grub refuses to grub

[Marius Bock]

Doing some googling I found 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/07/msg01160.html.
or maybe this will give you some answers:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2002-03/msg00005.html

maskie
Marius Bock -- marius at henriska.co.za



Don W. Jenkins wrote:
> I managed to solve a lingering problem I've had with my freezing display 
> after narrowing it pretty much to a hardware problem in the mother 
> board.  I had a new ASUS P4S800 sitting around that I wasn't using, so I 
> swapped it in today, so I have that and a Celeron 2.4 gig, 512mb of 
> memory, Nvidia FX 5200 video card, Proxim Orinoco wifi card, a 30 gig HD 
> for Windows and 60 gig HD for Linux, a regular CDROM and a CDRW.  I was 
> pleased to find that everything booted, got detected and worked the 
> first time, and there appears to be no problem with the display now.  It 
> was freezing in everything, including Windows, gradually worsening. But 
> what I can't do any more is get Grub to boot the machine.  No matter 
> which distro I try to install and have install Grub, when I try the 
> reboot, I get an "error 25" whatever that is, and the boot process just 
> stops.  For some reason Grub isn't able to pass off to the second HD 
> where the actual boot sector is, and I gather, where the actual Grub 
> menu is to select Windows.  To complicate things, I cannot get Linux to 
> rewrite my MBR, because I have Win2000 Server installed, which uses 
> NTFS, which does not allow write permission from Linux.  And I don't 
> recall, or never knew how to rewrite the MBR from fdisk on a Windows 
> boot disk.  I've even tried to get Win 2000 to reinstall, but it is 
> doing funky things at the point where it is supposed to reboot and 
> continue the install.  It just keeps going around again if the CD is in 
> the ROM, and if it is out, Grub is still in the way.  It hasn't 
> rewritten the MBR yet.  If I try the Linux boot floppy, it hangs at the 
> point where it would hand off to the boot sector on the second HD, also.
> Does this ring any bells?  I'm probably going to have to wipe the 
> Windows partition and do a clean install, and maybe the same for the 
> Linux side.  Or since I have a Win XP laptop, I may just make this a 
> Linux machine and forget the dual boot.
> Thanks,
> Don J.
>