It appears that grub partially clobbers the HP diagnostic partition on my Pavilion Xz355 notebook. The directory is still mountable and readable from Linux but when I try to boot the diagnostics by hitting F10 on boot I get a 'grub>' prompt which gives access to a longish list of grub commands. So on a hunch I added the partition to grub's menu and using grub to boot the partition I now get the messages: root (hd0,0) Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xa0 Chainloader +1 Makeactive Starting Windows 98 Type the name of the command interpreter (e.g., C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM) A> [end quote] Nothing I enter here will make DOS(?) happy (It will just repeat the prompt). I need to flash the bios, so before I go to the expense of buying a USB floppy, or the trouble of reinstalling Win-XP, I thought I would ask if there is any way to get grub to boot the diagnostics as it now sits. If not, what is the proper way to get grub to coexist with the diagnostic partition. My partition table before installing Linux (and reinstalling Win-XP): Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 3 24066 a0 IBM Thinkpad hibernation /dev/hda2 * 4 4864 39045982 7 HPFS/NTFS My partition table now: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 3 24066 a0 IBM Thinkpad hibernation /dev/hda2 4 2703 21687750 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hda3 2704 2769 530145 82 Linux swap /dev/hda4 2770 4864 16828087+ 83 Linux Like I said, the partition mounts under linux and looks like it has all the files it needs to run (including command.com), but grub does not know how to boot it (without some help?). Any suggestions?