GRUB question (Linux)

I'm having a bit of trouble with a Grub installation, and I'm hoping that some kind soul out there can point me in the right direction.

I have acquired a PC (AMD XP 1800+, 1.5GB RAM, ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard). For reasons that I don't want to go into here, I don't want to install GRUB on the primary hard drive, or otherwise make the machine unable to boot the existing XP installation w/o opening the case. The drive that was in the machine when I got it is a 80GB drive that was set up as a single NTFS partition.

I added a 120GB IDE hard drive as the secondary drive, set up the BIOS to boot from the second hard drive, and installed Linux (CENTOS 4.1) on that drive, with hdb1 as the /boot partition, hdb5 as the / partition (and a few others as well, but they're not important here.) GRUB is installed at the beginning of /hdb1. When the system powers up, I see "GRUB" appear on the console (the screen, whatever), but there it hangs.

I've tried playing wtih the /boot/grub/grub.config file, but it seems to be failing to load the next stage of the GRUB bootstrap.

I've checked the GRUB FAQ and read the manual, but I don't find any reference to doing what I want to do WRT IDE drives, just SCSI drives.

What I'd like to know is: Can GRUB be configured to load itself from a "Slave" IDE drive? I know Linux can boot in this situation; I've done it when I've installed GRUB on the primary (Master) hard drive -- it's just that I *** really *** don't want to alter the boot sector on the original HD.

Thanks in advance for any guidance that can be offered.

>>
I don't want to install GRUB on the primary hard drive, or otherwise make the machine unable to boot the existing XP installation w/o opening the case.
<<

GRUB can boot your windows XP installation. Just make sure windows is at the begging of the disk. If you *really* don't want to modify that disk then :dunno:

Thanks for your reply; I know that GRUB can be installed on the drive. That's not the point.

The reason that I don't want to modify the drive with XP on it's boot sector is that there is an application bound to the drive serial number and a cryptographic signature stored at the end of the boot sector that I don't want to lose use of, and I know (from previous experience with this app) that installing an alternate boot loader causes the license code in the app to decide that it's not licensed anymore and refuse to save, print, or run for more than 15 minutes at a time.