cannot install Grub from boot CD-ROM

From: Russ Fink (russfink_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 01/21/04 

Date: 21 Jan 2004 06:48:37 -0800

Greetings,

I have a clean, brand new system that I'd like to install multiple
OS's on (Win XP, Gentoo, OpenBSD, Solaris, and so on) that I can
multi-boot into. To support all these configurations and multiboot,
I'd like to load Grub on the master boot record.

The system has an IDE CD-ROM drive, and a hard drive on the same
channel.

I downloaded and burned the Gentoo-based SystemRescueCD onto CD-ROM
and booted the machine. I configured my partitions, formatted them
using QTparted, and then tried to install grub. Normally, you tell
Grub where to locate its various stages and config file, and it copies
these into the MBR.

I found that no matter what I tried, I couldn't get Grub to find the
stages on the CD-ROM - in fact, it refused to find the CD-ROM
entirely. The problem is that I can't get Grub to see the CD-ROM. It
sees the hard drives okay, but not the CD.

First question, is there a way to get Grub to interact with a CD-ROM,
or is this a known issue?

I forged a partial solution. Sysresccd has a feature where you can
install it on a partition of your harddrive, doing a bunch of copies
and a chroot or two. You install lilo to boot it, you boot it, and
then you install Grub which stomps over lilo. This works, yes, but it
is very painful and time consuming, plus there are other problems (the
vmlinuz1 from sysresccd didn't recognize my USB stuff, so I had to
BIOS them off.)

Second question, is there a better way to do what I just did? Maybe I
can just boot from the CD-ROM, simply copy the grub stuff to a linux
partition on the HD and grub install it from there?

Last question, (often it's easy to get so muddled in technobabble and
forget to ask the obvious) - what is the best way to create a
multi-boot system starting with a clean system, blank hard drive?
That's fundamentally what I'm trying to achieve, I'm not partial to
any particular method or madness.

Thank you for your time and thoughts.

Russ Fink

After reading documentation and trying it out, I

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