trying to understand how stage2 fits in

[Bob Berman]

I am curently happily running grub 0.96 from a floppy
to boot my system which has XP, 2K and Linux on it.
All is working quite well. I am going to install grub
to the hard disk, but I am just trying to understand
how this will affect things.

I understand that Grub writes stage1 to the first 512
bytes of the MBR. That is fine. On my first disk I
have W2K and Linux installed, and on disk 2 is Win
XP.  (Eventually I will be rejumpering disks so that
XP will be the first disk and will install Grub in the
MBR of that disk.)

Anyway, my question is: should I use a simple "setup
(hd0)" which installs stage2 right after stage1 or
will that overwrite some Microsoft stuff and cause W2K
now (XP later) to become unbootable?  Where do they
put the NT boot loader that Grub chainloads to
anyway?  Or should I just install stage1 in the first
512 bytes and put stage2 somewhere else with the
"install=" command?

I think it is safe to replace the first 512 bytes of
the MBR with stage1, but I'm not sure what comes after
that in a Windows system. Both W2K and XP are NTFS
file systems, btw.

Maybe I'm making more out of this than I need to, but
I want to understand what is going on and I want it to
work the first time I do it. And I want to use Grub as
my boot loader to boot my systems, and not any MS
product.