Well I'm reinstalling Debian in the hopes that reinstalling GRUB onto the MBR will atleast let me boot into Debian after the install then I'm going to try and uninstall GRUB by doing an apt-get remove grub and see what that gets me. Then I can do a manual install of GRUB in the correct place, whichat this time I'm not even sure what that is but we'll see...

Don't apt-get remove grub !!!

It doesn't have anything to do with your MBR, it is just the grub program installed in /sbin/grub

Reinstall, reboot into debian, and do a:
then make sure your grub.conf is all good.

If that doesn't work I don't know what to tell you.

OK, I finished reinstalling Debian and @ the # prompt I typed "/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda" and it said installation finshed without errors reported. I went to check the grub device.map file and it said permission denied even though I'm logged in as the root.

Now when I boot it's right back to doing the exact same thing it did initially. I'll post me menu.lst as soon as I get KDE up...

Here is exactly how grub's menu.lst looks right now:

## ## End Default Options ##

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.6-1-386
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.6-1-386 root=/dev/hda3 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.6-1-386
savedefault
boot

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.6-1-386 (recovery mode)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.6-1-386 root=/dev/hda3 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.6-1-386
savedefault
boot

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hda1
title Windows NT/2000/XP
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

And set like this it just stalls if I select the windows option from the boot menu after showing this:

Booting 'Windows NT/2000/XP'

root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

and I already tried using:

Booting 'Windows NT/2000/XP'

unhide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,2)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive

and it just stalls again. then when I retarted I got the an error that said:

GRUB Loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 17

so I'm not about to do that again.

Now what do you suggest. This sucks...

I honestly don't know what to tell you anymore. We've spent 7 hours on this now and it is starting to hurt my head. I can only imagine how frustrated you must be.

I can only say now, let windows boot itself and use a boot floppy to get into debian.

Sounds good to me but how do I get my MBR back to how it was before without GRUB so that windows can boot. Then I can make a debain boot floppy, BTW how do I do that?

Well, you need to run FDISK /MBR from windows, as for how you're going to do that I don't have a clue...can you boot any one of your windows from a cd or anything?

As soon as I figure out how to make a Debian boot floppy I can redo my MBR from the windows repair console if I remember right. Even after that I will still need to uninstall grub from Synaptic right?

Thank you for your help!

Alex

How would it work if I just had my 3 MS OS's on my 80GB master and put Debian Linux on a 30GB slave? How would I set that up?

I just won't be happy until I select what to boot from the screen without having to use floppies or do anything else...

Dunno.

It should have worked with your current setup. You would still need grub on your MBR though...or else it would just ignore your second HDD and boot windows.

You can check out loadlin, You use it to boot linux from windows:
http://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/~lermen/