an alternative approach...

[Brian Sammon]

Alternatively, I could tell you what I'm trying to do and someone can tell 
me if/how that can be done.  Hopefully, that will lead to a better 
understanding of things.

I have a computer that doesn't have a floppy drive in it.  It's a bit of a 
hassle to attach a (bootable) floppy drive.  So I'm looking to create a 
grub installation that's very hard to screw up.
My idea was to have the stage1 jump directly to the stage 2, which would 
be located in an unpartitioned section of the drive before the first 
partition.
The stage2 should look in a particular location on (hd0,0) , which would 
be a FAT filesystem, for the menu.lst file.

Can I do something like this?