Grub Boot Floppy Problems

[2die4]

Hi All,

I have a PC is a quadriple boot of FC4 (sda2) and XP (sda1) with the following patitions

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 14877092 12145888 1963300 87% /
/dev/shm 241596 0 241596 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3 99212596 94276 93997200 1% /home
/dev/sdb1 76920416 53078604 19934404 73% /data
/dev/hdb1 78129056 24588448 53540608 32% /mnt/ide
/dev/sda1 30701232 12091824 18609408 40% /mnt/xp
/dev/sda6 93597120 49672400 43924720 54% /mnt/vfat
/dev/fd0 1412 127 1213 10% /media/floppy

i want to do reinstall windows (which is th first partiton of the primary harddisk) but doing this will take out grub and I would lose access to my FC4 partition.

So I wanted to create a Grub floppy. I followed the standard procedure where you

1.mke2fs /dev/fd0
2.and copy stage1 stage2 menu.lst device.map grub.conf
3.then run grub and issue :
device (fd0) /dev/fd0
root (fd0)
setup (fd0)
quit

Except when I run this disk, I get the menu, but when I try to run FC4 I get error 17 (my fs is ext3 but it thinks it is) and when running xp i get "invalid system disk".

So in basically, I goot off the harddisk fine but when using a bootdisk it fails.

Does anyone see what could be potentially wrong?

Thank You

heres my /boot/grub/menu.lst

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,1)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda2
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=3
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp.img
title Fedora Core-up (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
title Fedora Core-up2 (2.6.12-prep)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-prep ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.12-prep.img

[buddha]

what's in the device.map file?

[2die4]

# this device map was generated by anaconda
(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/sda

[buddha]

Originally Posted by 2die4

# this device map was generated by anaconda
(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/sda

I was just guessing that maybe the drives were mapped incorrectly, perhaps something to do with having a SATA boot drive.

I used these instructions:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-faq.html#q4

to make a grub boot floppy and it works fine for me, but I have only IDE drives.

You might read through the GNU grub manual for more ideas about what's going wrong, and try running the grub shell interactively from the floppy and trying to detect your drives.