grub-install crashes on SATA drive

[Yarden Livnat]

Hi,

I've installed FC3 on a new machine having 2 SATA disks and 1 PATA. I'm 
using the PATA disk temporarily as a way to get around the issues with 
kernel that FC3 is based on. Everything seems to be fine, however I can 
not get grub to install on any of the  SATA disk. It just crashes.

Here is the setup:

1. Windows in stalled on /dev/sda.
2. Installed FC3 on  /dev/hda (the PATA disk).
3. boot into FC3 and update the kernel and everything else
4. boot into FC3 (now the SATA disks are recognized)
5. partitioned /dev/sdb, copy / to /dev/sdb2, and /boot to /dev/sdb1 
(/dev/sdb3 is swap)
6. I updated the device.map to include /dev/sda and /dev/sdb
    fix the /etc/fstab on the sata drive (/dev/sdb2)
    add entries to grub.conf so that I can:
    a. boot from the PATA disk (both root and /boot are on /dev/hda)  
(the original configuration)
    b. boot where / is /dev/sdb2, /boot is /dev/hda1 (i.e. only the root 
is taken from the sata drive)
    c. boot from the SATA disk (both root and /boot are on /dev/sdb)

so far everything is fine. I can boot into any of these configuration.

Now, I'm trying to install grub on the SATA drive so I can return the 
PATA drive I have borrowed.
However, it doesn't matter if I use "grub-install /dev/sda" or if I go 
into the grub shell and run the setup from there.
In both cases I get the same:

 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
[root at visware ~]# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2            151701060   3193736 140801348   3% /
none                   1029028         0   1029028   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb                652756    652756         0 100% /media/cdrecorder
/dev/sdb1               101086     20061     75806  21% /boot
[root at visware ~]# grub-install /dev/sda
/sbin/grub-install: line 475:  6134 Segmentation fault      $grub_shell 
--batch $no_floppy --device-map=$device_map  >$log_file <<EOF
root $root_drive
setup $force_lba --stage2=$grubdir/stage2 --prefix=$grub_prefix 
$install_drive
quit
EOF

Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
fix it and re-run the script `grub-install'.

# this device map was generated by anaconda
(fd0)     /dev/fd0
(hd0)     /dev/sdb
(hd1)     /dev/sda
(hd2)     /dev/hda

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

The order of the disks in the device.map does not matter (I fix the 
grub.conf accordingly).
No matter what I tried, I can not get grub to install on the SATA disk.

Any idea ?

Thanks,

    Yarden