GRUB booting from FAT32?

[Greg Trounson]

Greetings,

I have a dual-boot Linux/WinXP system that needs to be able to reboot to 
either OS on demand.

I figured the best(tidiest) way to do this is to have each OS modify 
GRUBs menu.lst and set the default before rebooting.  This would mean 
putting menu.lst et. al. somewhere where both Windows and Linux can see 
them, either installing an EXT2/3 writing driver under windows, or 
putting menu.lst on a FAT partition.  After playing with some windows 
EXT2 drivers, I decided to go with making the /boot partition FAT.

My /boot resides on a 256MB EXT3 partition at the beginning of the disk 
(hda1).

I would much rather use FAT32 than FAT16, as I don't fancy having to 
truncate all my kernel names and system maps to 8.3 characters.

I copied all files from the /boot partition to a safe location, 
re-defined /boot as FAT32 (with fdisk and mkdosfs) and copied the files 
back.  I had to copy grub.conf to menu.lst, as it used to be symlinked.

Now when I reboot, I get an Error 17 ("cannot mount selected partition").

If I redefine the partition as FAT16(again with fdisk and mkdosfs) and 
re-copy the files, I don't get Error 17, I get Error 15 ("file not 
found").  I think I know why the Error 15 occurrs, since the menu.lst is 
located in /grub relative to the partition, not /boot/grub.

This would suggest to me that GRUB can read FAT16 but not FAT32, which 
seems to go against what's stated in the GRUB manual.

Has anyone else had any luck getting GRUB to read FAT32?

thanks,
Greg