Hi

First of apologies if this is the incorrect forum.

Problem I have is I need to be able to ghost onto a HDD with 4 primary partitions, different system then provide an option to boot 1 of the 4 (unfortunately its windows NT or XP(work related))

I thought I could use GRUB to give a menu for which partition to boot. All partitions will be ghosted, no installations at all.

I have been testing in VMWare as follows to try and test this to see if it works.

Process Followed

Booted Knoppix
Load QTParted
Create partition table
split the 4GB disk into 4 1GB partitions(ntfs).
write the changed.

Create a GRUB boot floppy as follows using GRUB from Knoppix(instructions from GRUB website):

1. Create a filesystem in your floppy disk (e.g. mke2fs /dev/fd0).
2. Mount the floppy on somewhere, say, /mnt.
3. Copy the GRUB images to the directory /mnt/boot/grub. Only stage1, stage2 and menu.lst are necessary. You may not copy *stage1_5.
4. Unmount the floppy.
5. Run the following commands (note that the executable grub may reside in a different directory in your system, for example, /usr/sbin):

/sbin/grub --batch --device-map=/dev/null <<EOF
device (fd0) /dev/fd0
root (fd0)
setup (fd0)
quit
EOF
My menu.lst is as follows:

Code:
timeout 30


Title Partition 1 
unhide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,2)
hide (hd0,3)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot

Title Partition 2 
unhide (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,2)
hide (hd0,3)
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot

Title Partition 3 
unhide (hd0,2)
hide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,3)
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot

Title Partition 4 
unhide (hd0,3)
hide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,2)
rootnoverify (hd0,3)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot
I then boot the system with the boot floppy and get to a GRUB prompt

I use the command: root (fd0)
followed by: setup (hd0) to install it GRUB to the HDD.

When I boot i get the error:
Read Error
A disk read error happened while trying to read the stage2 or stage1.5.

at this point i'm a bit lost as to whether I can install GRUB without some form of linux on the disk?

Any help appreciated.