USB booting :: Boot USB CD from hard drive bootloader?

This may be interesting to you: I accidentally installed grub on my laptop (IBM T42/broken cd-r).

Now everytime I boot, I need to enter some grub code, because I cannot yet figure out where the menu.lst is and how to get at it from within Windows.

I'm trying to figure out how the grub landed on my hd0 instead of only on the USB flash, but I'm living proof you can do it.

Alex

Quote (squidx @ Mar. 30 2007,10:55)

there is a version of grub that can be install on a ntfs or fat http://www.geocities.com/lode_leroy/grubinstall/ . you don't need to edit your partition just your boot.ini file.

I had a similar situation to this with an old desktop - you don't mention it, but can your BIOS boot from a USB stick?

If so, you can boot from the USB stick, shrink your NTFS partition with ntfsprogs, repartition/format the hd and make a hd install.

Thanks for the suggestions -- I ultimately got the IBM rescue CD working on an old Mac CD-R that I frankensteined into a USB HDD. I then was able to reset my mbr in about 2 seconds, so now life is good - if the usb stick is in the drive when I boot, it starts up DSL, when it's not, I'm in my old XP.

My original comment was for miamicanes -- just to say that it *is* definitely possibile to install grub on windows without messing with partitions, because I did it -- inadvertently! (I recommend copying your boot.ini first, just for safety's sake)

Oh, and that grub version came from the DSL site someplace. If you need to know where, I could try to reconstruct my process.

Alex

original here.