Seperate /boot/grub partition

[Svend Sorensen]

I have several distros installed at once (including Ubuntu warty and
hoary).  I am installing each to their own single partition. 
Previously, I had them sharing a boot partition at the beginning of
drive, but this way is easier, keeps the different distros from
changing/overwriting each other's /boot files, and keeps all the files
separate.

Now I have a shared /boot/grub partition at the beginning of the
drive, since you can only have one bootloader installed.  This also
keeps the grub root partition constant when the other partitions
change.

The partition has the following symlinks:
boot -> .
grub -> .
to keep grub happy when it looks for its files under /boot/grub.

When I installed hoary, and selected /dev/hda1 to be mounted as
/boot/grub, the installed gave an error when installing the boot
loader.  I can't remember the exact error, but it didn't give any
helpful details that I can recall.  I had to skip over the bootloader
install (which was OK since I had an old grub install there already),
to complete the OS installation.

Does anyone know why the bootloader installation would fail when
/boot/grub is a separate partition?