booting problems

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.demon.co.uk>]

I wrote:

> I unpacked the Hurd last night. I can't boot it because the GRUB floppy
> doesn't work with my LS-120 drive. I suspect that it is misconfigured
> because most boot floppies (e.g. Debian Linux) work with my LS-120
> drive just the same as they work with an ordinary floppy.
> 
> I'll copy this to the list in case anyone knows of such a problem with
> Hurd's GRUB. Otherwise I'll see if I can use the floppy to reinstall
> GRUB onto itself (using my other machine which has an ordinary floppy
> but nowhere near enough disc space for playing with Hurds).

I took the most recent GRUB (0.5) and built it myself. The disc I got
was no better: it works with the ordinary floppy but doesn't work with
the LS-120. I had heard good things about GRUB so I'm disappointed.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might boot the Hurd? It's
in a partition that neither the BIOS nor LILO can see, I think, and
since GRUB won't boot from the floppy, I can't see any way of getting
GRUB onto the system.

If I could, somehow, get GRUB onto the system, is it likely that it
would succeed in reading disc cylinders that the BIOS can't? (It's a
recent BIOS but the disc was originally partitioned on a different
system and uses a geometry and BIOS settings that prevent the BIOS from
seeing it all, I suspect.)

Is there a way of using Linux as a boot loader ...?

Edmund