OK start from the beginning. The football is ordinary so I dug out the netbook and nuked the MBR. I run Mageia 3 dual boot with windows xp sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes, 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 102398309 51199123+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 102402027 312576704 105087339 5 Extended /dev/sda5 102402048 127588229 12593091 83 Linux /dev/sda6 127590400 135765314 4087457+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda7 135768064 312576704 88404320+ 83 Linux Boot with usbdrive (Mageia 3 install) to rescue console. mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/ grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda grub installed with out error and booted correctly see how you go. Cheers Nic