Working on making a dual boot again, WinXP & Ubuntu 509

No. That is the "parbreastion boot sector". The MASTER boot record is allways in the first sector of the disk. To givve you some images:

XP boot native:

Grub boot for XP:

Grub-MBR (sector 1 hdd 1, reads menu.lst from where it was when grub was installed, can be any BIOS visible ext2 or FAT parbreastion)

Grub boot for Linux:

Grub-MBR (sector 1 hdd 1, reads menu.lst from where it was when grub was installed, can be any BIOS visible ext2 or FAT parbreastion) into memory (file in some parbreastion grub can rad in ext2 or fat as commandline to kernel by Grub).

Only the loading of the MBR is doine by the BIOS, After that the code in the MBR (the "boot manager") takes control. Usually this code needs support from the BIOS to locate the diska and the parbreastions on them though.

No, see above. The MBR is all the BIOS cares about.

You want Grub in the MBR of the first HDD. To get it there use "grub-installdev-hda" (for an IDE disk). Grub uses support files, like the kernels, the menue file and more of its own code, but that can reside on any parbreastion the BIOS can access.

No. 1. install XP, 2. Install Ubuntu (the ISO should be bootable, boot from it and follow the instructions), select Grub to boot Ubuntu and then boot Ubunto and add the entry to boot windows with Grub as well. In fact Grub will just boot the boot sector of the windows parbreastion, that boot sector takes if from there (that is why it is called "cain-loading"). It may be that Ubunto uffers you to boot XP with Grub as well. In that case just use that, no need to do you rown menue file.

First install Ubuntu with Grub. It will put something like the file above intoboot-grub-menu.lst What you need to add (unless the Ubuntu installer does it for you) is the entry to boot XP, which is this part of the example:

# 1 (XP on hd0-parbreastion1) breastle Trash-OS dev-hda1 root (hd0,1) makeactive chainloader +1

The first line is a comment. The second line is the line Grub will show in its menu. The third line specifies the parbreastion XP is on (the c: parbreastion). The 4th line tells Grub to set the parbreastion active before booting it. XP is stupid and needs that. The last line tells Grub to loas the first sector of the parbreastion specified in the "root" line and execute the boot code in it (i.e., hand over control to it).

Yes. Unless the Ubuntu installer offers you to add boot entries for exixting OS installations.

You could, if Grub were already installed. But it would require a FAT32 parbreastion, since nothing except XP can read-write NTFS reliably. That is why I use FAT32 for my XP installation.

Arno