Comment 27 for bug 260001

My suspicion that GRUB won't install onto the Boot Block of a partition, doesn't turn out to hold water.

I did a reinstall with GRUB on the Boot Block of the root partition, and this time it worked fine.
The difference: This time I installed everything into one single partition; I did not configure "/home" to go onto a separate partition.

So, the first scenario that I tried, did not work: Setting up a root partition with a separate "/home" partition, and installing GRUB onto the Boot Block of the root partition.

Two other scenarios did work:
(1) Install everything into one single partition (no separate "/home"), and installing GRUB onto the Master Boot Record of (what Ubuntu 8.10 sees as) my first harddisk.
(2) Install everything into one single partition (no separate "/home"), and installing GRUB onto the Boot Block of the root partition.

***A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON MY HARDDISK CONFIGURATION***

There are four harddisks in this computer: One IDE, and three S-ATA drives.

The IDE drive is in the "slave" position on the IDE cable (the "master" is my DVD-RW).
Both the BIOS and Ubuntu 8.04 consider it to be the FIRST harddisk.
Ubuntu 8.04 calls it "/dev/hdb". Ubuntu 8.10, on the other hand, considers it to be the FOURTH (last) harddisk, and calls it "/dev/sdd".
Since the BIOS considers this to be the FIRST harddisk, the system will boot from the Master Boot Record of this disk by default.

My Ubuntu root partition sits on the first S-ATA drive.
Both the BIOS and Ubuntu 8.04 consider this to be the SECOND harddisk.
Ubuntu 8.10 considers it to be the FIRST harddisk.
Both Ubuntu releases will call it "/dev/sda".
Since Ubuntu 8.10 considers it to be the FIRST harddisk, it will set up GRUB on the Master Boot Record of this disk by default. In this scenario, I will have to select this disk as my boot disk (from the BIOS boot screen) whenever I want to run Ubuntu 8.10.

My Ubuntu "/home" partition (which I am currently not using) sits on the second S-ATA drive.
Ubuntu 8.04 considers this to be the THIRD harddisk.
Ubuntu 8.10 considers this to be the SECOND harddisk.
Both Ubuntu releases will call it "/dev/sdb".
(I believe, that BIOS considers it to be the FOURTH drive, but I would have to verify to be sure.)
The "/home" partition is actually the second partition on this disk; the first one is a 2-GB Linux swap partition. There's also empty space following the partitions.

The third S-ATA drive ("/dev/sdc" for both Ubuntu releases) currently only has a 2-GB Linux swap partition; the rest of the space is empty.