Please help my Grub Error 17 problem

[Dominic Leland]

Hi everyone,

I've been using grub for several years. Up until recently, I've never 
had a problem with grub. I never thought I would. Now I get error 17 no 
matter what I do. The following is basically just copied and pasted from 
a post I made to linuxquestions.org that went unanswered. I thought it 
would most likely get answered here.

Last week, I had some MBR/partition table errors, so I had to totally 
reformat my computer and start over from scratch. I dual-boot XP and 
linux, so I started with XP.

My XP problem was that every boot, it would say "missing operating 
system." I had that error before and the fix then was to delete the 
boot.ini (as I only had the one windows install to worry about).

This time however, that didn't fix it; what did was to change my hd 
settings in the bios from Auto to Large. Now I can boot into windows and 
everything's fine there.

Now for the linux part. Since I repartitioned and lost my old linux 
install, I needed to reinstall something. Neither lilo nor grub are able 
to boot my partitions, though. Here's my partition layout:

hda1 - NTFS - approx 22 GB
hda2 - NTFS - approx 38 GB
hda3 - XFS (also tried reiserfs and JFS) - approx 50 GB
hda4 - SWAP - 1 GB

Now, this type of setup never caused problems before, but now I can't 
get anything installed. First I tried Ubuntu (breezy badger - I know, a 
development release - I like living on the edge), but I got error 17. I 
tried to install lilo, but it just came up with a VFS kernel panic 
(which indicates it was able to get to the partition ok, ever since I 
found grub a few years ago, I don't want to be bothered with lilo).

So then I tried Arch. I've used Arch a lot off and on recently. It 
didn't seem to install the stage files, so after the install, I copied 
over the stage files by hand from the /usr/share/grub directory. I 
finally got grub installed...error17 again.

So I went into the bios. I know if I change it back to auto, windows 
won't work. And I know CHS isn't right either. I tried the only other 
option - LBA. That didn't work either.

Finally, I did an fdisk /mbr, but then nothing would boot. Went back to 
the bios, set it back to Large, and here I am.

If Large is the right setting, grub (or lilo, for that matter) shouldn't 
have a problem with it, should it?

Thanks for any help

PS: I finally did get a response, but it was to make sure my hd is set 
as master, which it always is.