Comment 20 for bug 26058

I had this problem because of Novell ZENworks. It overwrites sectors in the "unused" space at the beginning of a disk. This sector is part of the space where grub writes the stage1.5 files.

For more information about what ZenWorks does, see http://www.intl.novell.com/communities/node/5839/grub-and-zisd .

To solve this, I did not use grub-install and did not remove the stage1.5 files as described above. Instead, I started grub (from a rescue disk) and did this:

  grub> install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd1) /boot/grub/stage2 p /boot/grub/menu.lst

This makes stage1 go directly to the stage2 files. "install" is a lower-level command than "setup"; "setup" will use the stage1.5 files if it can find them.

I'd have to redo this if grub is updated. I'd like to have grub-install do this automatically, perhaps with a new option. But there needs to be someplace to record that skipping stage1.5 is in effect. I'm not sure where this should be recorded for the benefit of grub-install.

My setup:
Two SATA disks:
/dev/sda: Windows XP with Novell ZENworks installed (not my choice)
/dev/sdb: Ubuntu Jaunty

I choose which disk to boot from the BIOS menu, not from grub.