Monty Shinn wrote: ...
Phil,
Thanks for your input. I did find the location of the grub install modification. Strange thing is, when I restarted the install, grub defaulted to the MBR of /dev/sdb. I did not change any hardware or bios settings in between attempts. I have no idea why the change happened.
Once the install was completed, the OS partition showed up as /dev/sda, even though it showed up as /dev/sdb during the installation process. Grub is apparently happily residing in the MBR of /dev/sda. Again, I can't explain it.
If you (or anyone else) has insights to this behaviour, or can point me to where I can read up on it, I would appreciate it.
Thanks again for all your help.
Monty,
Not much helpful to add, except that I have seen many cases over many years of using RH/RHEL/FC and derived distros of device ordering changing among installer/boot/runtime versions of GRUB, among installer/installed/updated kernels, as well as among different contemporary distros. PCI slot priority, initrd, modprobe.conf, and BIOS settings are also variables so interactions among all these components can be quite complex.
If you really want to dig into it the kernel development and distro-devel mailing lists would be good starting places. There are also old threads in CentOS and Fedora list archives, some of which I participated in, on these issues. If you find any clear and enlightening docs on these problems, please share.
Cheers, Phil