It's been a while since I installed GRUB manually. I need some help with a failed install. This is on an older server that recently experienced a bootloader issue (accidently created by myself!) Anyway, I tried to repair my damage by installing GRUB (version 0.97). The horrible cellphone screenshot pictures below tell the story of what I tried. The first shows that the GRUB files exist on the disk. The second shows what I did on the GRUB commandline to try to install it. The third shows what happens when I try to boot (just a black screen with the message you see on the lower right, and a flashing underline cursor on the lower left). The GRUB files were created long ago when Debian Sarge was installed on this system. However, the system was never booted via GRUB. At that time I had the XOSL bootloader installed and used that. So while the GRUB files I'm trying to use now have been present for years, they have never been used. XOSL has been wiped out, so I cannot revert to that (not that I would want to anyway).

All the screenshots below were taken when I booted the system from a SystemRescueCD Linux LiveCD. And it was from that LiveCD that I ran the "grub" command.

Any hints on what I did wrong? Suggestions for how to do it right? This is for a computer at my work, and repair is urgent. Thanks in advance!

http://imageshack.us/a/img854/8057/6uyx.jpg

http://imageshack.us/a/img163/4374/ngx0.jpg

http://imageshack.us/a/img189/7976/hdje.jpg

If it's an old piece of kit, the BIOS may require the boot flag to be valid. It makes no sense to have it on a logical partition anyway (M$oft don't allow it).
With that setup, I'd put it on the extended (makes no sense either, but usually works), or try it on one of the pv's - that I haven't tested.

I found the problem. I was running grub off of the SysRescueCD. Installing using that version of grub, with a different version of the stage1/2 files existing on the harddisk did not work.

From a SysRescueCD boot, I mounted the relavent filesystems from the hard disk (/, /usr, et.al.) Then I chroot'ed into that environment and ran grub from there to do the setup.

This worked, and the grub installation is now functional. Thanks for your reply syg00!

If you're referring to the general wisdom that Windows cannot be installed on a logical partition, that is incorrect. I have installed it on a logical a couple of times. Works fine. There are a few tricks to installing it this way however.

Here is an old tutorial, but it expains how: http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/

I haven't messed with Windows for a few years, having switched pretty much to totally Linux. It is possible that newer versions of Windows have made booting out of a logical easier, or possibly they have made it harder. Back when I was booting Windows out of a logical, it was Win2000.