I have a few older systems (think original Pentium) which I have around. They had small hard drives which make them difficult to do much with these days, but I had larger hard drives around which I wanted to use. The problem was that the BIOS on each of the systems are only able to recognize drives of 8GB or less correctly. This is when Grub and Linux came to the rescue.
Linux has no problem accessing the drive directly and thereby recognizing it correctly. All I had to do was get the system to boot and Linux would take care of the rest. This is where Grub comes in. Installing Grub on the hard drive doesn’t work since the BIOS doesn’t know how to access the hard drive correctly. So I was left with the option of installing Grub on a floppy. My initial install had the menu.lst file also on the floppy which caused problems when updating kernels. It also meant that the /boot/grub directory wasn’t actually where the menu.lst file being used was. This annoyed me so I went in search of a better solution.
That’s when I found my solution. I install stage 1 on the floppy but point it to the partion containing my /boot so that all information for the boot is where it should be, but I’m still able to boot my system. The way I did this was to insert a floppy disk in the drive. From the command line type “grub”. Then I set the root device for Grub with “root (hd0,0)” or whatever device your /boot is on. Then I type ”setup (fd0)”. This has worked great for me. I just leave the floppy in the drive and the system boots normal like.
