Some derivatives of Debian still have the 1.5 grub. I have found that if I load Debian last and not load the 1.5 grubs Debian will update the 1.5s to Grub2. Ubuntu and Mint are already grub2 but Mepis, Antix and PcOsLinux are still grub 1.5.

Depending on which grub you want, just install the distro with that one. You can always opt not to install a bootloader on the subsequent installs.

I had one hard drive failure with an old IBM 60 GB hard drive at the same it was trying to load the boot loader. Good call on what you said. I have the Mint 10 Julia on the SATA right now and Fuduntu on a Samsung 80 GB that was given to me. I have tried to be real careful in watching where I put the bootloader on the same drive Samsung. That IBM hard drive gave me all sorts of head scratching. When I took out the IBM hard drive I was able to use that for the IDE backup DVD ROM. So one SATA is the 1tb and one SATA is a DVD ROM. Right now I just go to BIOS to change the boot order between running Mint and Fuduntu as Mint is Debian and Fuduntu is Fedora. When the hard drive went out it change the sda, sdb, sbc and sdd. On one install of Mepis when the hard drive went out unbeknownst to me I thought of checking through partition manager just what Mepis was calling sda and found out it was referring to the SATA. Right now I am real leary of putting Ubuntu back into the system. To me it is buggy. I guess when the lightning hit that one day it really affected my computer. Can't use the built-in Nic, built-in sound and since it is a BioStar motherboard the built chromium video is useless to me so I have to use the pci express Nvidea. Linux is still in process with OpenChrome right now.

It was a real anomaly for Ubuntu and Debian both trying to grub2. Ubuntu was grubbing 2 on the first master drive which was the 80 GB Western digital and Debian was grubbing 2 on the SATA. And then the IBM 60 GB went out. So what happened I guess is it split the Samsung into two virtual hard drives. I thought hey I just got one 40 GB but the system says I have three and where did my other 80 GB go. I am glad I got that IBM hard drive out of the system.

I had looked forward to the new Ubuntu release. Installed it after I backed up all my files on the external drive. Good thing. It loaded once. I hated the utility desktop, shut it down because my brother showed up. It would never boot up again. reinstalled older version. Looks like I may have to go back to Debian again.

Better detailed (if you don't mind, cause it sounds like you'd never tried this) you could assign a main/ favorite install that would take care of bootloader chores. You can then NOT install and even remove grub from the other installs. That should keep everybody behaving by not clobbering the bootloader every time you (re)install or update another linux installation.
For the guy that is forever installing, removing, repartitioning and otherwise switch, changing or re-arranging (i.e YOU ) a small /boot partition can be a good idea. That way you always have grub on MBR and it'll find it's modules in the boot partition (you'll always have a boot loader on disk)
The downside is just that you have to enter the main grub OS each time you (re)install or have a kernel/ initrd update and run update-grub for everything to show in the grub menu correctly.
If a guy wanted to get really slick, he'd use a flash drive for his boot disk and /boot partition and have a grub command shell available no matter what happened to the hard drives in his box.
One more note- if the update-grub os prober doesn't find all your installs on every disk, you can manually tell grub about them to get them on the menu, saving you from entering bios to change boot disks. (as long as there is an initrd in /boot for everybody, I think it should find em, tho)
Hoping this saves you much time and effort.
Cheers, man!

Good advice. Gentoo's System Rescue disk will do just that. It is one of my favorite downloads besides Parted Magic. Gentoo's rescue disk through a floppy it will make will boot any Gnu/Linux or Ubuntu on one option. On another option it will boot any OS. It has unetbootin and will put a bootloader on an OS that doesn't have one. And if you don't like Linux it will put freedos on a drive for you. I am quite impressed with it.

* Based on: Gentoo
* Origin: France
* Architecture: i586
* Desktop: JWM, Xfce
* Category: Rescue, Live Medium
* Status: Active


SystemRescueCd is a Gentoo-based Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM or USB drive, designed for repairing a system and data after a crash. It also aims to provide an easy way to carry out administration tasks on a computer, such as creating and editing hard disk partitions. It contains many useful system utilities (GNU Parted, PartImage, FSTools) and some basic ones (editors, Midnight Commander, network tools). It aims to be very easy to use. The kernel of the system supports all of today's most important file systems, including ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS, Reiser4FS, btrfs, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660, as well as network file systems, such as Samba and NFS.