GRUB and two HDs

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, at 10:51am, tedroche at tedroche.com wrote:
> Unfortunately, this only works if both drives are in the system. If
> there's only the built-in drive, it boot to greet me with "GRUB " and a
> blinking cursor. I had expected that I still would have seen the menu, but
> only the Windows option would have worked. So, grub has only inserted a
> loader into the MBR, and still needs to read the menu from the second
> drive?

  GRUB has multiple stages.  Stage 1 typically lives in the MBR.  Stage 1
has just enough marbles to find a larger stage, load it, and jump to it.  
In many cases, that larger stage will be stage 2.  Stage 2 is the main GRUB
program, which gives you the menu, CLI, and boot loader functions.  You may
also have a stage 1.5, which gets used when more marbles then stage 1 has
are needed before stage 2 can be loaded.

  In most Linux distros, stage 2 is in /boot/grub/ on either the root
partition, or a special partition just for /boot/.  For you, that would be
on the second physical disk.  So when you remove it, there is no stage 2 to
load.

  LILO works pretty much the same way, BTW.  There's just less of it to load
in stage 2.  If you've ever seen LILO die after printing just "LI", that
means it failed to find and load LILO's stage 2.

  I think other people have given you some good options.  I suspect the
option that uses the NT boot loader to chain to GRUB is best.

  Another option, if GRUB supports it, is to install GRUB into your NTFS
partition on the first disk.  I kinda doubt GRUB supports that, though.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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