Hello, i got my new Thinkpad x220, the other day and am now trying to set it up the way i want it. I want a separate boot partition, a shared data partition which will be mounted in home, the swap and root partitions for each distro.
Anyways, i currently have no os installed. I have deleted everything with gpart. I am trying to setup the boot partition with grub1, while in gpart, but i'm having issues. I tried following some instructions that went like this:

"mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/mnt (I made a mnt directory in mnt, as this command wouldn't work other wise)
cd /mnt/mnt
mkdir -p boot/grub
cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/* /mnt/mnt/boot/grub
grub
root (hd0,0)"

The last command gives out the message,
"Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83"

googleing it, the gentoo wiki says
I am pretty sure that my boot partition i had made is hd0,0. It's the first partition on my only hard drive. It's a ssd if that makes a difference.
Just to make sure, i tried the command,
which produced "Error 15: File not found"
The Gentoo wiki again, says,
(for the record, i am not installing Gentoo, it just happens to have very good documentation)

I have looked at several 'separate boot partition' instructions, and i didn't see anything about installing a kernel in these. I have been busting my brains over this for the last few hours this morning and last night. I have tried unmounting the partition then trying them commands too, but that was also unsuccessful. I have been getting more and more frustrated and it doesn't help that my girlfriend i cracking it because i'm spending so much time on the computer, GOSHH!. So any help would be greatly appreciated and thankyou to all who were patient enough to read this entire message.

Installing grub is the last step and is handled by the install cd, you don't have to do it manually. Boot into the install cd for the distro you want to install first. It will have the utilities to setup the partitions and format them. Create all the partitions you need.

While doing that you also tell it what the partition is for e.g. swap, boot, home, var, etc. Then it'll copy all the files into the right partition and install grub to the mater boot record or to one of the partitions. Which ever you choose.

This is an informational message, not a problem. In fact, if you don't get this message, then there is a problem.

Presumably the instructions say to "setup (hd0)" next - have you tried that ?. After making *sure* that ssd is hd0 of course.

Hello, gammahermit, i wanted to do it manually, so i can get my partition setup exactly the way i wanted. Anyways, thankyou syg00, perhaps i should have tried the obvious, but instead i just assumed that that message was an error because i had been formatted in ext3 earlier, not ext2. either way, following the next step in the instructions which was setup, has worked and now i have my independent boot loader, thank you.

Ted tends to use ext2 as a generic name for all his derivatives, you will see this often with tools like fsck.

I have a problem here, should it not be (if /dev/sda1 = /boot and /dev/sda2 = / )
because the boot-directory exists in any Linux filesystem and you'll have to mount the boot-partition in /boot if you want to use it. And within a chroot-environment (where / is mounted to /mnt/mnt) you'll need to have mounted the bootpartition to /mnt/mnt/boot
But it's possible that I didn't get what you really want to achieve.

Markus

@markush, i wanted a separate boot partition with grub, which ultimately will chain boot to each distro which also have a boot loader inside. for example, i boot my computer, and it boots grub, which boots grub2, which boots Debian. The advantage of this is, if i screw up my boot files on a distro, i can still access my other distros from the first bootloader, and perhaps fix the problem from there.