I (like so many others) have been struggling to make Ubuntu dual boot.

My setup is roughly as follows:

dell dimension 9100
two SATA drives:
XP installed on 1st drive (NTFS partition, also fat16 partition 0, and fat32 recovery partition, and fat32 program partion)

Ubuntu on 2nd drive (also fat32 data partition, and swap partition)

BIOS does NOT allow me to select which drive is bootable.

I was led to believe that it was a bad idea to put GRUB on the MBR, so it is in /boot/grub

I first tried the GvR method alluded to here:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...t=dual+boot+xp
(scrolll about 1/2 way down)

When I try to boot kernel 2.6.12, i get "error 22--partition not found
When I try to boot to recovery mode, i get that fine.

Editing c:/grub/menu.lst does not seem to change the reported partition.

(i also could not find additional info on GvR anywhere!)

Then I tried (what i thought might be simpler) the method suggested here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=316702

I get something very much like:

Missing File:
C:\Windows\System32\hal.dll

(windows boots fine)


Suggestions? Is it really ok to writer GRUB to the MBR?

thanks

The grub install is buggie in my experience with Ubuntu but I do not see why installing it into the mbr would be a problem. You are not going to boot Ubuntu unless you do. Or, seeing that you already have grub installed to another partition, you could use a boot manager installed to the mbr to boot windows and ubuntu.

http://gag.sourceforge.net/

FWIW, GAG does not appear to support SATA drives

Yes it does. I use it and my drives are sata.

i think that there is nothing wrong with putting grub in the mbr. If something happens you can always use the fixmbr command with an windows xp cd. i igree with fair_is_fair

thanks all.

follow up Q:

If i want to move grub to the MBR, is there a simple way to do that, or do i need to re-install Ubuntu? (remembering that i can seemingly only run Ubuntu rescue mode at the moment)

Ok, GAG works fine. Thanks....still curious about moving grub.