My system dual boots WinXP (hda) and Debian (hdg). I want GRUB to move to the MBR of the Debian drive (g) to make it bootable so I can move that hard drive to another computer. Is there a straight forard way to achieve this?

Restoring the Windows MBR (to delete GRUB) with the XP disk is the easy part, but I'm not going to do that until I know what to do with GRUB first.

Try:
If you have a seperate /boot partition on /dev/hdg then you probably want this:
However, I am still not 100% sure this will even work. You may have to use a livecd and install grub again to wherever it actually exists after you physically move the HDD.

The second one didn't work at all (said something about not finding stage 2?). The first one did install GRUB, but then it printed off what seemed to be my device map file, and asked me to make changes to it if need be:

file:/boot/boot/grub/device.map

(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/hde
(hd1) /dev/hdg
(hd2) /dev/sda
(hd3) /dev/sdb

I guess the Windows drive is hde, not hda (though it seems to say that the drive is hda during the bootup scroll). Debian is definitely on hdg.

Anyway, I left device.map as-is and rebooted just to see what would happen. GRUB would load then reboot the system, and this would have continued in cycle, so I powered down and returned the cables to the original setup.

Concerns:
- I'm confused as to why the boot menu didn't pop up. It's location hasn't changed just because GRUB is installed on a different MBR (or has it?).
- Debian's Sarge net-install CD does not function as a rescue disk, and I don't have a GRUB boot disk either.
- If I start messing with device.map and get it wrong, I won't be able to make things right by just swapping cables to their orginial places.

Any more suggestions?

- T.

try reading my tutorial?

normally.....bios boots to a drive to its mbr then to its bootloader THEN if you chose grub it then jumps to its booting files.

so you merely make grub go into the drive you want bios to see first
then amend the linux....../boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect the bios boot order and hardware as per my tutorial.

that does not stop you from going into bios each time you want to try a different bootloader on a different drive but thats your choice