Boot disk

I installed a few flavors of *nix and they all failed with Grub. To explain better he's my setup.

/dev/hda - Data storage
/dev/hdb - *nix drive
/dev/sda - Data storage
/dev/sdb - Windows XP pro drive

So, during the setups I've installed Grub to the MBR of /dev/sdb and /dev/hdb... and... each time I got boatload failure... same thing on the hard drive. Sometimes I'd get "can't find OS"... that was fun also. Basically... I never used to have problems... granted I can see that four drives could make it more difficult and... since my OS drives appear to be slaves (is that the problem?) well, it loads XP...

basically... what I want is a boat loader that would give me a way to load it.... I'm thinking something htat allows you to define your device and load. Could I do this from a mini-linux floppy? If so how would I restart a live-floppy into a *nix on my drive? Thanks.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

You shouldn't have to install Grub to the Windows XP drive, since Windows XP has its own bootloader. (All grub needs to do is hand off control to NTLDR, or so to speak.) That is probably the cause of the boot failures, I bet. (Also, Grub does have a command line that would let you "define your device and load" with the appropriate Grub commands.)
Could you post your grub.conf here? (Usually /boot/grub/grub.conf)

There's nowhere I can't reach.

At this point I have it installed but can't get into it

I can see why it would fail on the XP drive... and since that drive probably boots before the linux drive that makes sense why it fails loading from MBRs. But why would a bootdisk fail? Also, to fix the problems after it fails loading from MBR I do "fdisk /mbr" ... so, if I'm clearing the MBR wouldn't it clear NTLDR?

In any case, could I create a grub bootdisk editing grub.conf to the proper configurations?

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.