Installing GRUB on guest disk

[Michael ODonnell]

I could use some help - here's my situation:

   SystemG (Good) has GRUB installed on it and everything
   works fine.

   SystemH (Hosed) has an otherwise good disk (with live
   files on it that I want to preserve) that needs to be
   have GRUB (re-)installed on it.          (Don't ask...)

   For reasons I don't want to go into, my only approach is
   to install the systemH disk as a second drive in systemG
   and operate on it from there.  In other words, it'll
   be /dev/hdb while installed in systemG for re-grubbing,
   but it'll be /dev/hda once it's back in systemH.

   To further complicate things, the disk in question has
   a dedicated /boot partition and the local custom is
   to keep things in a /grub subdirectory therein (ie.
   when that partition is mounted as /boot that /grub
   directory becomes /boot/grub) and that's where we want
   all the GRUB files to end up.

I happen to be a fan of GRUB (particularly its flexibility
compared to LILO, once it's installed) but I've never
had to sweat the details of installing it.  Since I have
slogged through a number of semi-esoteric LILO installs
(heck, there was a point where I'd have had no trouble
arranging for a triple indirect chain-loaded LILO boot
with a somersault off a floppy) I am surprised to find
that GRUB is giving me trouble, but the docs a bit glib
and not much help.

So, before I haul off and download the source code, does
anybody have any tips?  In particular, has anybody done
what I'm trying to do?  I reluctant to just experiment on
systemG because it's a loaner and I don't want to harm it.

To repeat, the desired result is:

   diskH:MBR has GRUB-stage1

   diskH:partition1 has a /grub directory containing all
   other necessary GRUB files (like the stage2 and grub.conf)

...all accomplished while diskH is installed as hdb
on systemG but destined to serve as hda on systemH.

TIA,
   --M