I just got my machine set up to dual boot Windows XP and Gentoo, I had a bit of a hard time getting grub to work right mainly because I wasn’t coming across the information that I needed to get it going. So here is my machine info in hopes that it might help some others.
Drive partitions
hda1 – Windows XP
hda2 – /boot
hda3 – swap
hda5 – /
hda6 – /home
hda7 – /mnt/share0/
hdb1 – /mnt/share1/
Grub.conf – I have it default to start Linux
default 0
timeout 10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gztitle=Gentoo Linux 2005.0 – Default
root (hd0,1)
kernel /bzImage root=/dev/hda5 udevtitle=Windows XP Professional SP2
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
When I installed Grub I did it like so
# grub
grub> root (hd0,1)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
That got it working for me. Now when you reboot you should have grub ask what OS you want to boot into. They should both work at this point. I did read somewhere that you should have SP2 installed before you dual boot as it tends to rewrite the MBR. I cant confirm this as I made sure to install it before I installed Gentoo/Grub.