On Wednesday 20 April 2005 13:51, Vickram Crishna wrote:

At 11:44 AM +0530 4/13/05, sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:

his help would probably have worked). Many thanks to both of you, but I am sorry to say I still need help.

Always welcome as long as you are doing your bit which is trying.

...

title deb-2.6.10 root(hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz boot=/dev/hda1 dma acpi append="whatever"

here is my menu.lst

I could boot up using the RH9 install disk and going to the command line, but failed miserably to find the menu.lst file.

Ok copy and paste my menu.lst in your grub partition then edit it to suit your installation. note grub is installed in my mbr.

My question is, can I manually write an entirely new boot loader to MBR without reinstalling

Yes you can but that is avoided by even the linux grey beards. You have to use dd. In the case of floppies dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 count=1 bs=1024 dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 seek=1 bs=512

Ofcourse it is also a nice way to SCREW your harddisk.

(especially since even the install disk didn't seem to be able to do that automatically, and the Ubuntu installer wants to rewrite the partitions, which I guess will lose me the RH9 installation)? My active partitions (ext3 fs) are hda6 (/) and hda7 (/usr), and I have hda8 (swap) also. Other partitions on the disk are Windows98 fs where I already have a Win98 installation and data.

You have to install grub only once: grub-install /dev/hda

After that you only need to edit ../grub/menu.lst or cut and paste the lines below into a text file called menu.lst and save it to ../grub

root (hd0,5) boot=/dev/hda default=0 timeout=10

title deb-2.6.10 root (hd0,5) kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda6 idebus=66 append="hdd=ide-scsi dma apm=power-off" #the above line is a single line dont wrap it.

title win root (hd0,1) # hide (hd0,4) rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1

rgds jtd