On Tuesday 17 February 2009, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:

> One thing that could be at fault is that I had grub installed into hd0,2
> (sda3) which is an ext4 partition.  

I think that this is probably the cause.  GRUB has these stage 1.5 fs related 
files:

`e2fs_stage1_5'
`fat_stage1_5'
`ffs_stage1_5'
`jfs_stage1_5'
`minix_stage1_5'
`reiserfs_stage1_5'
`vstafs_stage1_5'
`xfs_stage1_5'

> /boot is sda4 and is ext3.  But I'm 
> sure grub should work no matter where you install it.  I can even
> install it on sda1 which is NTFS and it works.  Hell, I can even install
> it on the swap partition.

I think you are mixing stage 1 and stage 2 GRUB images?  Stage 1 is installed 
in MBR or any partition's boot sector.  No knowledge of fs is required for 
that to be accessed (by BIOS or a chainloader)  and JUMPTO deals with that.  
The 1.5 images on the other hand are used to read the fs in which GRUB's 
stage 2 is installed.  That's far too large to fit into a boot sector.  I 
doubt that GRUB's e2fs_stage1_5 can read ext4, but I don't know really - a 
question for GRUB's mailing list?

> I guess the reason it broke will remain a mystery :P

-- 
Regards,
Mick