Re: Bug#185770: grub: incompatible with Windows 2000 NTFS when installed on MBR

[Thierry Laronde]

Hello,

> > 
> > After the MBR install, I can access the GRUB menu fine and boot into
> > Linux, and reboot into Linux as many times as I like. I can also
> > choose Windows from the menu and boot Windows, once. When I then
> > reboot from Windows, grub prints out "Loading stage1.5..." (or
> > something similar) for a fraction of a second, then it blanks and goes
> > back to the BIOS startup screen, and this continues in an infinite
> > cycle. I use the floppy to boot into Linux and notice that the boot
> > sectors have been changed by Windows:
> > 
> >     $ dd bs=63b count=1 < /dev/hda > /boot/boot.broken
> >     $ cmp /boot/boot.grub /boot/boot.broken
> >     /boot/boot.grub /boot/boot.broken differ: char 2561, line 15
> > 
> > (and cmp -l shows that everything is different beyond that point).

The problem is indeed with the stage1_5 which reside on the first cylinder
that is unused by _filesystems_ but is an unruled zone for others (there
should be the information in the partition table about these hidden sectors
but this is merely ignored by everybody).

So the solution is actually to install GRUB without any stage1_5 (simply
remove the stage1_5 after compilation and before installing GRUB : it will
do without).

Cheers,
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <address@hidden>
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C