Node:Installation, Next:Booting, Previous:Naming convention, Up:Top
First, you need to have GRUB itself properly installed on your system, (see Obtaining and Building GRUB) either from the source tarball, or as a package for your OS.
To use GRUB, you need to install it on your drive. There are two ways of
doing that - either using the utility grub-install
(see Invoking grub-install) on a UNIX-like OS, or by using the
native Stage 2. These are quite similar, however, the utility might
probe a wrong BIOS drive, so better be careful.
Also, if you install GRUB on a UNIX-like OS, please make sure that you have an emergency boot disk ready, so that you can rescue your computer if, by any chance, your hard drive becomes unusable (unbootable).
GRUB comes with boot images, which are normally installed in the
directory /usr/share/grub/i386-pc. You need to copy the files
stage1, stage2, and *stage1_5 to the directory
/boot/grub. Here the directory where GRUB images are installed
and the directory where GRUB will use to find them are called image
directory and boot directory, respectively.