questions about / request for help with GRUB

[Richard Dice]

Hello, everyone...

I was hoping someone out there would help me out with some questions 
regarding grub.  I've been using lilo for years for my dual boot system 
(Win98/Linux) but I've recently upgraded my Windows to WinXP and from 
what I understand this mandates grub rather that lilo.  So, I'm looking 
to move things over.

I'd like to experiment by first creating a grub floppy -- I figure best 
to make sure things work there first before I target the MBR of my hard 
drive.  Once that works then I'll target the MBR.

I wish there were some "grub recipes" out there that I could copy off 
of;  as it stands, the grub documentation is kind of abstract and seems 
to assume deep knowledge of booting philosophy, as well as the grub way 
of doing things.

So, first question:  is there any way to avoid the "grub shell"?  I'd 
like to just specify a file that has all the info in it necessary and 
just go from there.  If this can be done, what should the path&name of 
the file be?  What command line should I invoke grub with to do the job?

If this is possible, then the first task is making a grub conf file that 
targets a floppy disk and has boot options for WinXP (on /dev/hda1) and 
Linux (with a /root partition on /dev/hda2; no seperate /boot partition).

Second, I want to do the same, but with a grub conf file that targets 
the MBR of /dev/hda.

In case it helps, I run Debian GNU/Linux 3.0.

Thanks very much for your help...

Cheers,
Richard

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