Installed GRUB on MBR or First Sector of boot
 

I want to understand the concept of this:

I installed windows on the HD.

I want to install FC3, I partitioned the hard disk , the (/boot) is hda2, and the roo (/) hda4,and the rest.

If I want to install bootloader (GRUB) , I will get two options

1- First sector of the drive (MBR).
2- Fisr Sector of the boot partition.

I did two tests:

1- Fisr sector of the drive (MBR) :
There was no problem (I could boot windows and linux FC3 on some PC and Mandrake on the other)

2- First sector of root partition
There was problem, althought I tried to activate /boot (in my case hda2 not root) by using system commander utility ,it did not work, then I tried to activate root (/) (in my case hda4, not /boot) by using system commander utility, it did not work either

With the second option I have read (I have not tried it yet) , that I have to modify the bootloader for windows NT (I read many article on net) to point to the bootloader (LILO, GRUB) for linux (i.e to point to the "/boot" directory , which is in my case "hd0,1").

Then why should I activate (make it active) the partition that contains the "/boot" directory, if I am going to modify the NT bootloader ?

My understanding (Correct me if I am wrong), I have to modify the bootloader for NT; to point to the bootloader for linux (LILO, GRUB), and I should make the NT bootloader active (not Linux bootloader)

I'm not sure how to solve it, but on my FC3 installation, I installed the boot loader on /boot and boot fedora using XOSL . It's an open source boot loader that allows to boot multiple OS's. I had to install it since FC3 failed to boot win XP when I put grub on MBR, works very good, and it even allows you to boot CD's and floppies.

Help me to install grub 0.97, i have done:
cd grub-0.97
./configure
make install
but when I type grub-install --version i get : 0.9.3
what must I do to update the older grub ?

any help please members

Sorry I can't help, I've never updated grub manually before, but for your post, it seems you haven't uninstalled the previous version of grub; you should uninstall it fisrt, then on grub's build directory it should be something like './configure' , 'make' , 'make install'. Anyway, follow the steps detailed in the README.

As you said, I must uninstall grub then install the new one by just typing ./configure; make; make install. Please assure me that after when I restart, I will be prompted for the newly installed grub.

Sorry but I think some thing is missing because after installing a software from source, we must usually handle the dependencies and set up the kernel to use it. Please provide more info.

The build process when you install from source handles the dependencies when you install from source, so after running 'configure' and 'make' if all goes fine you should have no problems. Before uninstalling your previous version of grub make sure the build process goes fine and you don't get any errors, then save the following files from your /boot directory: grub.conf or menu.lst (depending on your configuration), config-<kernel-version>, vmlinuz-<kernel-version>, initrd-<kernel-version> and device.map. Then, from the build directory run 'make install'. After install is finished make sure all these files are inside your /boot directory. But be aware, these are generic instructions, since I have no experience updating grub manually (i haven't done it before). Make sure to read grub's README and INSTALL files and follow all the steps detailed there. (Also the FAQ if there's one). But I have a question. why do you want to update grub?? I mean, if you can boot without problems you shouldn't update it, and if you have some problem it must be due to misconfiguration or something.