Please Fix Grub Soonest! It's Killing My PCs. No Joke!

[oldefoxx]

Grub 2 does not work with so-called legacy Grub.  Not so surprising that Legacy 
Grub can't work with Grub 2, but to have neither work with the other?  How 
inane and user unfriendly is that?  Never, mind answering, I already know.  And 
it is not like I have choice of which to use with any LiveCD.

Now a new and even more troublesome problem.  I fight for weeks to get around 
these problems, but losing ground instead of gaining any.  Now my PCs are 
reporting grub error 17 or grub error 22.  Trying to run this down, they both 
indicate that they cannot find a partition.  You mean I am locked out of my own 
PC because grub is searching for a partition that is not there anymore?  Now 
that is damnably stupid on your part.  What right have you to decide that any 
partition is fixed in terms of size, place, type, or content?

And no way to fix this.  That's right.  Someone says use grub and find to 
locate your boot drive, the do setup on that drive, which should clear the 
problem.  Maybe for someone else, but not for me.  On reboot, same error.

Best I can determine is that it relates to the MBR, whjich has somehow gotten 
corrupted.  Only suggestion for fixing it is to use a Windows XP Setup disk, 
but nobody bothers saying what to use then.  I suppose it is "fdisk /mbr", but 
how many people out there have such a startup disk?  I would think not many.  
And the MBR is just a guess anyway, but what else might it be?

One post says use install-mbr, with a few parameters thrown in.   Great, but 
what if you don;t have install-mbr, and the provided iink no longer goes 
through?  And of course the package manager never heard of it.

Another search turned up that this is as part of another post:  install-mbr is 
part of the mbr package.  And yes, I can pull down mbr and install it.  
Wonderful.  I now can do install-mbr, and it does something.  I mean i use it 
several times over, once for each drive and once for each first partition.   
Will that do it?  Don't know.  I first repartitioned all three drives, and got 
a balk on the third one one the second drive, meaning 4 on #1 and doing #3 on 
the second, and get a partitioning formatting error that the software has dme 
how gotten confused about the partitions.  How could that  be?  I just created 
these partitons and am using the same program to format them all as ext3.  I 
give it up for the night.

Okay, so new day, and was able to delete 3rd and 4th partitions on #2, the 
create one as a new partiton.  Went through the install phase with Ubuntu  9.04 
targeted at 
/dev/sda1, and the boot process targeted tis way (according to what is shown on 
the screen: " grub-install (hd0) ".  But snce drive 1 is EIDE connected and 
drive 2 is SATA connected, there seems to be an issue at times as to which is 
drive 1 to the software.  To to play safe, I figured maybe I ought to include a 
manual "grub-install (hd1), and guess what?  Grub won't accept (hd1).  I have 
to do /dev/sdb1 instead.  You won't even accept your own syntqx!

But then i get the next error:

address@hidden:~# grub-install --recheck /media/a1
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
Format of install_device not recognized.
Usage: grub-install [OPTION] install_device
Install GRUB on your drive.

  -h, --help              print this message and exit
  -v, --version           print the version information and exit
  --root-directory=DIR    install GRUB images under the directory DIR
                          instead of the root directory
  --grub-shell=FILE       use FILE as the grub shell
  --no-floppy             do not probe any floppy drive
  --force-lba             force GRUB to use LBA mode even for a buggy
                          BIOS
  --recheck               probe a device map even if it already exists

INSTALL_DEVICE can be a GRUB device name or a system device filename.

grub-install copies GRUB images into the DIR/boot directory specfied by
--root-directory, and uses the grub shell to install grub into the boot
sector.

Report bugs to <address@hidden>.
address@hidden:~# 

Oh, by the way, /dev/sdb1 is set up and formatted as ext3.  Just in case you 
were wondering.