grub and flying elephants

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

The subject line is for those who remember Dumbo and the line "I guess I
will have seen everything when I see an elephant fly".

Well Grub has shown me something I have never seen before so I need help.

We have 7 identical machines bought at the same time. They are the Dwarf
machines. I have successfully got Dwarf1 and Dwarf7 up and going with FC2.

This morning I loaded exactly the same software through untarring an image
of Dwarf7 on Dwarf2, 3 and 4. I changed the entries in the hosts, network and
ifcfg-eth0 files. I changed the grub.conf so it looks like the ones that
work. I will include a copy below. When I run grub-install the all three
machines return with the error:
the file /boot/grub/stage1  not read correctly.

I copied the whole grub directory from a working machine and got the same
error. On another machine I zeroed the boot part of the MBR and got the same
error from grub-install. I am clueless. Any help would be appreciated.

==============      grub.conf file =========================

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You do not have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
#          root (hd0,3)
#          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda4
#          initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=20
splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.11_FC2smp)
	root (hd0,2)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.11_FC2smp ro root=/dev/sda3  
	initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.9-1.11_FC2smp.img


title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.6_FC2)
	root (hd0,2)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.6_FC2 ro root=/dev/sda3  
	initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.9-1.6_FC2.img

#title WinXP
#        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
#        chainloader +1

-- 

=======================================================================
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
One Trinity Place.
San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

telephone: (210)-999-7484
email:akonstam at trinity.edu