With your hint of boot signature I found this. So it's indeed so that 2.6.23 and up require atleast grub 0.93.
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What? Are you sure? I think it's more likely your filesystem has better support in 0.97 / you have ext2/3 using large inodes which weren't supported by even 0.97 but there's a patch for 0.97..
Is grub-0.97-disk_geometry-1.patch the one you were refering to? (I'm in the middle of a usb boot grub saga and I wondered if it was this or something to do with U3)No - that's another fix for 0.97, not related to the newer inode size in new e2fsprogs. A shame they don't update 0.97 as they moved on to grub 2..
The LFS patch for it is grub-0.97-256byte_inode-1.patch, in LFS-dev at least. Here, if you want to download.
On my latest system I applied this inode patch and this colossal collective patch from CLFS-dev to grub 0.97. Just in case you might want to recompile and get all kinds of goodies ;) it has about all fixes for grub 0.97 and the grub-splash graphic support also.i've always had problems with grub and live cds because all i have is an external usb cdrom. it just seems to forget it after loading. loadlin and freedos has always worked though.
original here.