I spent the weekend to fix this XP patch and now can install GRUB on either FAT or NTFS under XP. Should also work under W2K/NT but definitely not 95/98/ME(they are cripped win32 that the program will not run) where I believe loadlin is a better solution.

GRUB now gives me more flexibility to test out linux on my 'Microsoft' controlled HD, comparing with LILO which requires me to rerun under linux whenever I want to add a new kernel/initrd combination.

I would mail you the files after I clean them up a bit. Too bad I can't find a place where I can setup a website so people can download from there as I believe it would be quite useful for situation where booting from floppy/cd-rom is disable. A KNOPPIX like system can slip into an XP machine by :

xcopy stage1 c:\boot\stage1
xcopy stage2 c:\boot\stage2
xcopy xpgrub.exe c:\boot\grub\
xcopy menu.lst c:\boot\grub\
c:\boot\grub\xpgrub
echo 'c:\boot\stage1="linux"' >> c:\boot.ini

and on the next boot up, KNOPPIX can take over.

Of course, the menu.lst must be prepared.

In fact, I learnt a neat trick on GRUB mailing list that I can boot a CD-ROM from GRUB through Smart Boot Manager for those non-IDE CD-ROMs like PCMCIA connected one(that is the feature of SBM), or as mentioned a machine with CD-ROM booting disabled. So it is possible to just have grub(and friends installed) and boot KNOPPIX CD from there. Of course, for odd CD-ROMs, the initrd in the KNOPPIX CD needs to be changed to load the proper drivers before it start the search of itself