Problems with dual boot and grub (Jim Cornette)

[Kenneth Becker]

  (Jim Cornette) States:

>The BIOS goes to the mbr first and if it is not redirected by the mbr 
>content, it goes to the only active partition that you mentioned.
>
>On this setup, grub is installed in the mbr. If the mbr was overwritten, 
>it would boot into the partition marked active (XP in example)
>
>If I installed grub to /dev/hda2 and then made the partition active, 
>grub will boot and be able to redirect the boot according to the 
>grub.conf file. I could boot into grub without it being installed in the 
>mbr.
>
>  
>
Yeah, that's exactly what I had done - install grub on /dev/hda2 (which 
is the /boot directory) and rig it so it was the active partition. I've 
got the problem solved, now, but what I was getting was "no operating 
system" from the bios. After a bit of that I posted for help, here, and 
got it - by having the comp load the XP boot.ini file, and from that, 
loading c:\linux.bin, which has grub in it. Grub then loaded the correct 
stuff from the grub.conf file in /boot/grub, and the comp started up 
linux, as desired.

So: Why did I get that "no operating system"? It's not something with 
the LBA, otherwise the linux.bin file wouldn't have worked!

Ken Becker