editing menu.lst w/o HDD

[rankinreb]

I have an old Dell laptop, Latitude XPiCD P150ST that has a bad HDD controler. I can get it to boot w/ a W98 boot disk and access the CD-ROM. What i'm tring to do is run Knoppix live. With it being so old i don't think i can get any of the newer distros to run so i've been trying STD. I have grub and copyed over grub.exe and menu.lst. I can call grub then all i get is just a flashing cursor at the top of the screen. I'm sure the problem is w/ menu.lst 'cause i don't know how to edit it. Most of what i have found on here is for running from a ISO on the HDD. Any help just to get started would be nice.

[Kowood]

I wonder if they realized the "other" meaning of STD when they released that. I'm also sure that grub is not an exe. Usually with grub, you can just hit e to edit the current line, and then rewrite it to point to your hard drive.

[rankinreb]

That is the problem, the HDD or controlor is dead or a bad cable, got some things coming in to test all that out. I have never used grub before so i'm not too sure what i'm looking at in the config files. just looking for some pointers of what to take out and what to leave in.