Easy grub testing?

[lukekendall]

I've used grub a little bit now, but the feature I miss the most
is the ability to test out changes to see if I've screwed up.
Replacing the boot loader with, or updating the boot data, is
a pretty scary operation, one you'd like to have good confidence
in.

I'd find it really helpful if grub reported line numbers in the
configfile (or better yet, identified the syntax error or the
name of the file or device it couldn't find).  As it stands, when
you get an Error: 12 or similar, the only technique I've found to
sort out what I've done wrong is to laboriously try a "find" on
each file/path I've mentioned in turn.  If I've made a mistake with
the (hdx,y) spec for root or setup, it's difficult to diagnose.

With lilo, at least it identifies the error when you attempt to install
it, so it's not too hard to check that you got your lilo.conf correct.

With grub, I always offer up a little prayer and cross my fingers,
and just hope I got it right.  Surely there's a better way?

BTW, on one machine I get this warning when I boot:

    Grub loading stage2
    "(hd0,7)/boot/message" has wrong format, press a key to continue

(If I hit a key, it boots up okay, although it flashes up a few lines
of text following that too quickly to read, and then the boot process
starts.)

While the file /boot/grub/message exists, I have no idea what created it
or how to fix it.  The Grub manual
(http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_mono/grub.html) doesn't
mention this error in the list of problems, or what to do.  This is grub
running on SuSE 9.0.

But my big fear is that it's so hard to check the grub config file for
errors.

luke