Reinstalling GRUB

[David Alexander Harvey]

To Whom It May Concern:

I recently installed Red Hat Linux 7.3 as an upgrade to Red Hat
Linux 7.0 and because of familiarity with the problems LILO had
with Windows NT (particularly with Windows-2000 Pro) and no
experience with GRUB put the GRUB boot loader over on /dev/hdb1
[ (hd1, 0) in GRUB parlance] and continued to use BootMagic on
the first drive with Windows 98-SE.  Windows 98-SE developed
problems and so I replaced it with Windows-2000 Pro only to
realize that I could no longer boot to Linux, and when I tried
to install BootMagic I was informed it could only live on a
FAT16 or FAT32 file system.  Wonderful.  So I carved off a tiny
portion on the front of the first drive and gave it a FAT32
file system that I installed BootMagic on.  It now dual boots,
but lo and behold I found that the second choice of GRUB which
was Windows 98-SE was now Windows-NT and despite the fact that
the partition had moved up slightly from the base to make room
for the FAT32 file system that it would boot.  But I can NOT go
into BootMagic and reconfigure it so that Linux was my first
choice.  Here is what I have:

Linux        GRUB
Partition    Partition    File System    Mount Point
=========    =========    ===========    ===========
/dev/hda     (hd0)        MBR               (home of BootMagic)
/dev/hda1    (hd0, 0)     NTFS           F:
/dev/hda2    (hd0, 1)     FAT32          G:
---------    ---------    -----------    -----------
/dev/hdb1    (hd1, 0)     ext3           /  (home of GRUB)
/dev/hdb2    (hd1, 1)     Linux SWAP
/dev/hdb3    (hd1, 2)     ext3           /var
/dev/hdb4    (hd1, 3)     EXTENDED
/dev/hdb5    (hd1, 4)     ext3           /usr
...
/dev/hdb10   (hd1, 9)     FAT32          C:

Please do not ask me why Windows-2000 installed itself as
drive F:!  My only thoughts about this are that when I used
Partition Magic to blow away drive C: and make an NTFS on
it (which Windows-2000 didn't even recognize as its native
file system), it had already mapped the CD drives as D: and
E: and F: was the next available drive letter.  Even though
drive G: is the second partition on the first drive, it is
actually the first portion of the drive after the MBR area.

Now since I can't configure BootMagic anyway, what I am
proposing to do is to remove it.  Here is how I propose
to go about doing it.

[1]  Remove BootMagic, unfortunately this doesn't help
     completely because I can't turn the system off or it would
     be unbootable because I can't fire it up and reconfigure
     things.  Yes, I went and looked at the configuration file
     and can't make heads or tails out of it.  I assume an
     fdisk /mbr should make it bootable to only Windows 2000
     again but I wouldn't know.  I may have to contact
     PowerQuest before doing this.

[2]  (Optional)  Reinstall BootMagic.  At least this way I can
     at install time make it deactivate itself which will cause
     Windows 2000 to boot again.  Then I can remove it.

[3]  In Partition Magic, delete the second partition and let
     the NTFS have the whole disk again.  Yes, it can actually
     move things around with the 2000 version of Partition
     Magic.  It really is magic.

[4]  Now, I have a system that will boot only to Windows-2000,
     unless I want to use the bootable floppy to boot to Linux.
     So, I will boot to Linux with it (yes I will make sure
     this works before I even start all of this).  Now, I will
     dd the first portion of the zeroth drive in case putting
     GRUB there mucks things up.

[5]  Now, I have to migrate GRUB from living on (hd1, 0) to
     (hd0, 0), or more specifically to the MBR on the first
     drive.  This is where I get stuck.  I have read your docs
     and other people's docs until I am turning blue and I
     still can't figure out how to do it.  I can give you my
     /boot/grub/menu.conf file if that helps any.  In other
     words, this is the place I need help.  If you can point
     out a site to me that shows me how to do this I would
     appreciate it.


Thanks

David A Harvey


PS   I would be willing to setup a web site for answers to
     questions like this except I am afraid the school here
     would not like all the hits they get. So far I haven't
     found any place out on the web that answers the problem
     I have.  I AM CONVINCED IT IS SOLVABLE!