This package is known to behave badly when you have changed its default optimization flags (including the -march and -mcpu options). Therefore, if you have defined any environment variables that override default optimizations, such as CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, we recommend unsetting them when building Grub. Grub needs a patch to fix a compilation problem with GCC-3.3.1 patch -Np1 -i ../&grub-patch; Prepare Grub for compilation: ./configure --prefix=/usr Compile the package: make And install it: make install mkdir /boot/grub cp /usr/share/grub/i386-pc/stage{1,2} /boot/grub Replace i386-pc with whatever directory is appropriate for your hardware. The i386-pc directory also contains a number of *stage1_5 files, different ones for different filesystems. Have a look at the ones available and copy the appropriate ones to the /boot/grub directory. Most people will copy the e2fs_stage1_5 and/or reiserfs_stage1_5 files.