A change of advice with apologies
Previously, when other posters have had difficulty with MBR or sector 0 dual boots, I've suggested making a boot floppy and simply inserting that whenever a Linux boot was required. I've realized the error of my ways.
There is another, rather painfully obvious solution, which speeds up the boot measurably and is much more flexible: install grub to the floppy. Once configured grub, can boot conveniently to any partition you wish, and the kernel is loaded directly from the HD, which is much faster. You can find directions here. The article doesn't cover copying the stage 1.5 file to the floppy, but you should copy one of them from /usr/local/share/grub/i386-pc/ when you copy over the stage1 and stage2 files and before you init (fd0) in grub.
(Now, if I could just get grub to load my menu.lst automatically at start; I'd be very pleased.)
My apologies to anyone whose wasted 20 seconds on every boot coming from a floppy. Mucho apologies to anyone who had to laboriously resys that boot floppy on every kernel bugfix, reboot, recompile their Nvidia drivers, resys and reboot again and again at 20 seconds wasted each time.
Your lost time has been cheerfully refunded. I'm going to bed now.
Qvacks.
There is another, rather painfully obvious solution, which speeds up the boot measurably and is much more flexible: install grub to the floppy. Once configured grub, can boot conveniently to any partition you wish, and the kernel is loaded directly from the HD, which is much faster. You can find directions here. The article doesn't cover copying the stage 1.5 file to the floppy, but you should copy one of them from /usr/local/share/grub/i386-pc/ when you copy over the stage1 and stage2 files and before you init (fd0) in grub.
(Now, if I could just get grub to load my menu.lst automatically at start; I'd be very pleased.)
My apologies to anyone whose wasted 20 seconds on every boot coming from a floppy. Mucho apologies to anyone who had to laboriously resys that boot floppy on every kernel bugfix, reboot, recompile their Nvidia drivers, resys and reboot again and again at 20 seconds wasted each time.
Your lost time has been cheerfully refunded. I'm going to bed now.
Qvacks.
