GRUB dual boot problem

[Steve]

I won't go too deep into my system complexities, but here is the score.

GRUB is sat in the MBR of /dev/hde (which is on IDE0)
/boot is on /dev/hde5 ((hd2,4) according to GRUB auto-setup)
NTLDR is on /dev/hde1 (so that'd be (hd2,0) right?)

Anyway, hde5 is the active partition, and the following in menu.lst doens't let me boot windows from GRUB:

Title Windows XP SP2
rootnoverify (hd2,0)
chainloader + 1

It just sits and does nothing. Now, if I make hde1 active, XP boots with no grub. So, I get the feeling GRUB is actually NOT in the MBR, but in hde5 (thinking as I type now.)

So, what do I need to do to setup dual booting properly? I have an MBR backup from when before linux was on - so if it all goes wrong windows will be recoverable.

I'm running Debian sarge at the moment. Should I run "grub-install /dev/hde"? or something else?

Cheers,
Kez.

PS - When I had Fedora on this comp with the exact same drive setup it autodetected windows fine and set GRUB up. However, debian didn't see windows (probably thanks to NTLDR being on a different directory the the main windows volume.)

[directhex]

done a little googling

in your bios, try to force LBA, instead of Auto. apparently has helped people with GRUB/Windows issues (as GRUB misreads Auto as CHS)

[Steve]

Well it appeared that in spite of my instructions, GRB installed to /dev/hde5 rather then the MBR of /dev/hde

A quick bit of dd'ing and modifying boot.ini meant the XP bootloader presented a "Linux" entry, and could chainload GRUB.

Smashing!