I have an HD with mulitple partitions and multiple systems. I am going to make my own game machine, and what I wanted to do was copy everything from hda6 (my / drive) and hda7 ( my home drive). I formated the new drive as hda1 and hda5 is the swap (40 gig hd).

I mounted the drive onto the 2nd IDE channel (so it was hdb1 and hdb5), copied the hda6 partition, and then copied the hda7 partition to the /home directory on hdb1.

I modified the menu.lst in /boot/grub to hd(0,0) and the fstab accordingly on the new system.

However, no matter what, I keep running into grub errors. I chroot to the drive and run "grub-install --remap /dev/hdb" and that didn't work.

I went and installed the hd in the new system, and still had problems, so I booted off a cd-rom and did the same thing, but with /dev/hda now, and I keep getting stage1 file problems...

What am I doing wrong? Is there an easy fix?

The easiest fix that I can think of is to boot your Linux installation CD and select "System Repair" from the list. I've found that several of the largest distributions have this option.

I would have expected the chroot + grub-install to work based on your already edited menu.lst on the partition into which you chrooted. I'm surprised that it didn't work. Maybe it would work if you leave out the remap parameter on grub-install.

I think you'll find that grub is still looking at/for the menu.list that is (was?) on hda6 which was your previous root partition.
For help with grub, please search LQ for posts by Saikee - his sig has excellent grub links.

I don't know why it didn't work either... I just ran mandriva installer, selected upgrade, and it put lilo on there and works (didn't pick the right settings for the x server though...)... ran xorgconf and I was able to get it up and running...

Thanks for suggesting running the disk again! I used the console mode first, but I was unlucky... no biggie!

google for supergrub it can fix linux and windows mbr.

remember that when you create new partitions and add drives they are reordered in their listed sequence and grub's menu must be told where they are now located.

I had tried supergrub, but didn't get anywhere with it, actually... so... the reinstall and reverting to lilo worked for now... once I get the computer set up the way I want, I might play with it a bit more...

Turns out the problem was my inode on the new drive was set to 256, and if it isn't set to 128, grub has problems... lilo worked, and since this is actually my arcade machine (in an arcade cabinet I built), I won't really be using the boot options anyway...