Seperate /boot/grub partition

[Rich Rudnick]

On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 13:28 -0800, Svend Sorensen wrote:
> 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?

It's not that /boot/grub is in a separate partition, but the
interactions between the way you've linked the two directories and where
you've mounted the partition. 

You should remove the boot and grub links, create a directory called
grub at the top level of /dev/hda1 and move the grub files there.