["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.]
On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:12:10 GMT, Patient Guy staggered into the Black
Sun and said:
> I want [to] put GRUB or [something] like it on the hard disk that
> boots Win XP. Clearly it will move or relocate the XP boot/loader

Nope. GRUB's stage 1 generally occupies the MBR, with stage 1.5 in the
slack space between the MBR and the start of the first partition. The
'Doze bootloader lives in sector 0 of the 'Doze partition.

> [I want GRUB to] ask me to select whether to boot from the USB pocket
> drive or from the hard disk.

If your machine can't boot from a USB device, nothing you do to GRUB
will help. GRUB uses BIOS functions to read sectors. You *could* have
your /boot on the machine's disk. /boot can be really tiny, about 40M,
so it's no problem to use the gparted LiveCD to resize your machine's
'Doze partition so there's space for /boot.

> I need to know if the boot selection program also REQUIRES that the
> USB pocket drive with bootable OS be plugged into the machine before
> the boot selection program is run (i.e., before power up), or if the
> pocket drive can be inserted and then the program list of bootable
> options can be "refreshed."

Huh? If the BIOS can't read sectors from USB devices, it won't matter.
Once a Linux kernel image has been loaded from /boot using BIOS calls,
it can have its / and /usr and /home and /var and everything on any
device the kernel can access. (USB, SCSI, NFS, whatever.)

> If [GRUB] exists and can be configured and placed on the hard drive
> where the XP system is, what is the best way, or what are the options
> or limitations for placing it?

Put it in the MBR. Easy, simple, easy to remove with FDISK /MBR or
FIXMBR. GRUB can chain-load practically any x86 OS, so long as the
bootloader it chainloads is on a BIOS-accessible drive.

> I would prefer downloading and running some kind of XP program (EXE)
> that writes the code/image directly to the boot sector,

You're talking crazy talk, man. Use GRUB. That's what it's designed to
do.

--
And I ruthlessly pay as little money as possible for as many french
fries as I can, thanks to the evil tax dodge known as "Super Sizing."
-- tps12 on kuro5hin.org, 06/14/2002
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see