need help installing grub to a floppy

[Martin Maney]

On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 09:57:38PM -0400, Dale Kosan wrote:
> I need help doing the above. I have Acronis True Image software 
> installed to the mbr for my Windows Xp system, I have a second drive 
> that I will be using for Ubuntu. When it asks where to install grub to  
> during the install I have tried the following:

Well, there must be someone who's taken pity on those not already in
posession of a working Linux system, but Google chose not to reveal any
binary images of complete grub boot floppies to me.  If you do have
access to a working Linux (or other *nix) machine, you could build the
binary parts from source, after which it's easy to assemble them into a
menuless generic grub boot disk:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Creating-a-GRUB-boot-floppy.html

The other half of your problem is where to install grub during the
Ubuntu installation.  I'd suggest either the MBR of the installation
drive or the root filesystem's partition (or that of /boot if you
needed to make that separate to cope with BIOS limitations).  This will
let you manage the loader locally, and the floppy stage won't ever need
anything but

root (hd1)		(for MBR; (hd1,n) if it's in a partition)
chainloader +1
boot

...which will start up the copy of grub on the installed-to drive, and
you'll get your menu and all just as expected.

Come to think of it, the primary disk's loader may well allow you to
boot to a secondary bootloader - I would expect that would work with
the install grub to a partition approach, but check your loader's docs.
All I know about Acronis is that while failing to find a grub floppy
image I came across a passing mention about how one fellow is hardened
to alwyas reinstalling grub in the MBR when he restores a system with
Acronis or ghost.  :-)

Luck!

-- 
...and of course you must be careful not to overwrite the bounds of
memory blocks, free a memory block twice, forget to free a memory block,
use a memory block after it's been freed, use memory that you haven't
explicitly allocated, etc.  We C++ programmers have developed tricks
to help us deal with this sort of thing, in much the same way that people
who suffer severe childhood trauma develop psychological mechanisms to
insulate themselves from those experiences.  -- Joseph A. Knapka