[NTLUG:Discuss] grub loader messing with my head

[Terry]

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 11:12:28 -0500, David Evans <david at bluelinetech.com> wrote:
> Okay here is a good one.
> fellow employee asked me to load suse 9.1 onto a usb external hd so he
> would not have ot do anything to his xp home install. He has a compaq
> presario 2100 laptop.
> 
> So I said yea we can do that..
> So the install goes well and everything works except his laptop will not
> boot unless the usb external drive is hooked up to the computer.
> Apparently suse changed the location of his master boot record and i
> need to change it back so windowos will boot off of itself again without
> the external hd.
> 
> is this making sense to anyone.
> 
> all of his windows is still intact but when I try to boot without the
> usb drive hooked to it the boot all the screen displays is
> 
> grub
> 
> help
> Has anybody done this like and wished they hadn't is so please help.
> 

That's interesting. Grub's default is to install to the primary HD,
not sure why that would happen.
If it really did install grub on the USB drive, you shold be able
re-install or fource it to write to hda's mbr
>From man grub:
   --install-partition=PAR
              specify stage2 install_partition [default=0x20000]

I would assume the command would be something like:
grub --install-partition=/dev/hda
or
grub --install-partition=hda
or
grub --install-partition=hd0

[seems like before I used 'grub --install hda'  or something shorter,
don't remember for sure]

BUT
grub --install
 should install to hda, (because that's default).  So, I'd try that first.
or you may only have to run:
grub
for it to install to mbr of hda (which is supposedly default)
[If not], look at /boot/grub/grub.conf