Well, I've read a million (minor exaggeratoin) posts about Grub's infamous error 17, but none that really seems applicable to my situation.

Earlier this week, I had some MBR/partition table errors, so I had to totally reformat my computer and start over from scratch. I dual-boot XP and linux, so I started with XP.

My XP problem was that every boot, it would say "missing operating system." I had that error before and the fix then was to delete the boot.ini (as I only had the one windows install to worry about).

This time however, that didn't fix it; what did was to change my hd settings in the bios from Auto to Large. Now I can boot into windows and everything's fine there.

Now for the linux part. Since I repartitioned and lost my old linux install, I needed to reinstall something. Neither lilo nor grub are able to boot my partitions, though. Here's my partition layout:

hda1 - NTFS - approx 22 GB
hda2 - NTFS - approx 38 GB
hda3 - XFS (also tried reiserfs and JFS) - approx 50 GB
hda4 - SWAP - 1 GB

Now, this type of setup never caused problems before, but now I can't get anything installed. First I tried Ubuntu (breezy badger - I know, a developement release - I like living on the edge), but I got error 17. I tried to install lilo, but it just came up with a VFS kernel panic (which indicates it was able to get to the partition ok, ever since I found grub a few years ago, I don't want to be bothered with lilo).

So then I tried Arch. I've used Arch a lot off and on recently. It didn't seem to install the stage files, so after the install, I copied over the stage files by hand from the /usr/share/grub directory. I finally got grub installed...error17 again.

So I went into the bios. I know if I change it back to auto, windows won't work. And I know CHS isn't right either. I tried the only other option - LBA. That didn't work either.

Finally, I did an fdisk /mbr, but then nothing would boot. Went back to the bios, set it back to Large, and here I am.

If Large is the right setting, grub (or lilo, for that matter) shouldn't have a problem with it, should it?

Thanks for any help

Silly question; but your disk is setted as Master ?

I was installing Debian 3.1 and my disk was on the IDE2 and as a Slave, and i had 2 errors; the 25 and the 17.

that's not too silly of a question. I can understand that sometimes it's the easiest things that go overlooked.

But yes, it is master. Many upgrades ago, I used to run both my burner and hd on the same IDE cable and always the hd was master and burner was slave. Since that ended up causing problems, I've always put them as masters on seperate channels, regardles.