-- and yes I have done that many so far.. grrr...

And *still* cannot boot Gentoo Linux on my real, *working*, drive.

I have a 30GB Maxtor that I used as a test/victim drive to install Gentoo to, including dual-monitor ATI and Win4Lin5_for_win9x.
*Finally* got it all together with a little help from people on the web, and a *whole* lotta sweated blood. I now have one nerve left, and it ain't doing too well.

Oh! Kay!, now I am ready to replace the old, semi-useless SuSE9.0Pro (/boot.and / partitions). Extracted from the 39G-SuSE-/ probably more than I needed to, & replaced it with the contents of the 16G-Gentoo-/, all OK.

Copied 204M from 30G to 204M on 120G, both as "hda2", if you will. Remembered to change part-refs in the kernel lines. Didn't need to change anything else in grub.conf (a.k.a.: menu.txt or menu.lst, whatever) since same (size, even) part in same part-number on both drives, and even at the same offset from the start of the disks. (Sub-8G, sub-1024cyls.)

Ran fine on the 30G, but the 120G, on the same computer!, gives a grub stage-1 error about not being able to get the drive geometry, and stops. I have tried *everything* in the local documentation.

SuSE9.0Pro's grub had no such problem in the same places on the same 120G drive.

(I use, for my own reasons, another boot-loader in the MBR, and will, for now, continue to do so, and this problem shows why I am a genius to do so.)

I am going to keep reading, on the net now, since I have exhausted the reading-matter on my computer locally, and gotten nowhere *slowly* for *that* effort.

I may also try a *totally* blank /boot and re-re-re-&c-re-install grub into that.

Any clues or *high*-value sites/pages for me to visit, anyone?

Hardware, bios, & grub:
Mobo: Shuttle AN35N 400 Ultra + MCP. (nForce2 400-U chipset)
BIOS: Phoenix-Award BIOS v6.00PG (AN35500L) / bottom: 12/5/2003-AN35-6A61BH2BC-00
Drive: WD1200JB-00EVA0
(I _think_ those were all zero's; hard to tell without a 'marked' zero nor a capital-'O' to compare with...)
grub was the latest portage d/l for 2004.3 as of two weeks ago.

Thoughts, anyone?

Thanks,
rgh.

Explanation: Grub consists of two parts. First stage1 boots and then stage1 loads stage2. Geom Error is shown when grub can't find stage2 in the specified location. This happens when you swap hard-disk's from primary to slave or from primary ide port to secondary.

Steps to boot:
Go to http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub.html and download the latest grub software. untar the grub for 386 file. It would have stage1 and stage2 file. Change to this directory and put a floppy and type
dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512c count=1
dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512c seek=1

Now boot with floppy disk or if you may find boot floppy from grub's site.
Use it load the gentoo.

hmmm, I think a extra reply may confuse contude? bad joke.......btw dont use gentoo

what I suggest is you read the tutorial in my signature but I will dumb it down

you need to run grub on each drive to embed grub into mbr AGAIN but so it points to appropiate files
if you are only wanting grub to point to new partition for say dual booting you only run grub once into mbr and then edit your /boot/menu.lst file

but I think if I understand you is that you are swapping drives or trying to copy stuff from one drive onto the other but assuming you don't need grub to pointed to its booting files

Both: Been very busy, so apologies for replying late to a lot of things...

Problem solved! -- grub_stage1 address 0x40 needed to be changed from 0xFF to 0x40, which idea I got from someone out here in internet-land.

Grub is a *great* replacement for Lilo!

contusion:
Thank you!
Specifically did not want to have to boot from floppy or cd -- makes several things more complex here, and anyway, I know that a previous grub was booting on the same harddrive, from the same part# at the same physical place on the disk.
The error was, I think, "GRUB Drive Error", meaning that grub couldn't even try to find the stage{1.5 | 2] file.
A I mentioned that I have another MBR loader (BootMagic from PowerQuest); I intend to eventually replace BM with grub. In this case, however, I am not sure putting grub in the MBR would have avoided this -- possibly BM was giving wrong info to grub?
The rest I already knew, but of course you didn't know that, especially the way that fast-written message looked (!).

aus9:
<...may confuse contude...> == 'may cause contusion--confusion'?
<no gentoo> no problem.
Your Guide -- As It Happens, I found that a few minutes ago; nice!
Grub was never even getting *close* to the menu.lst/grub.conf file; see above.
The 30G was a test-bed -- I coped the 30G/boot partition to the 120G's /boot part (both 205M), and I emptied the 120's /-part(~37G) & copied the entire 30G/-part(~16G)'s content into the 120's/-part. This shouldda worked. See above re 'BM-vs-grub?'.

Thanks all for the help!,
rgh.