Damn blinking "_" ...

[melmoth]

Hi everybody, after a lot of lurking, here I am asking some advice on a problem...
The scenario:
- a medion notebook with 40 Gb of hd space.
- 1 logical NTFS partition (2.5Gb) to boot win xp
- 1 extended partition, subdivided in 1 ext3+1swap for linux and 3 fat32 for win. The ext3 partition is below the 1024 cylinders limit, since I cannot set the lba options in the bios.
- I can run any flavour of knoppix without any problem from cd. I just have some problems with the wifi card, for wich I need to install every time additional drivers. So I thought of installing knoppix to hd to solve this problem.
Now, I've chosen to install grub on the /root partition, not on the mbr. I then followed this procedure:

Run the following command: dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
Copy the linux.bin file to C:\
Edit C:\boot.ini
Add the following line at the end: c:\linux.bin="Linux"

Well, that done I reboot, choose Linux from the list and the screen becomes black, and the only thing I see is a blinking "_" ... At this point all I can do is rebooting to windows.

Any advice on this ?
Thank you in advance ...

[tdjokic]

Most user install grub in MBR and than add a couple of lines in it, something like this:

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

So, you will have Linux boot menu, with Linux and Windows as options.

[melmoth]

That could be an option, but, if possible, I'd avoid it.
The fact is I think there is something wrong in my installation of grub: if I boot via the live-cd and go to the root partition of the hd-installed knoppix, there is not a /boot/grub directory... I think something went wrong during the installation process, even if I did it twice ...

Thank you for your help !