Grub on MBR just won't "take"

[lug at the-leveys.us (Don Levey)]

 wrote:
> Maybe I'm wrong here, but doesn't one of the partitions on the drive
> need to be marked 'Active'? Also, BIOS needs to know which drive to
> start the booting process from, so if you've got two drives, make sure
> the one your installed grub to is setup as the first drive your BIOS
> sees, and that its set to boot from it (sometimes called C: to the
> BIOS)
>
> -Josh
>

Hmm, I think I did all that.
The partition is marked active in fdisk, and I can bring up a BIOS-based
boot menu to select which drive to boot from.  Trying to boot from that
drive gives me an error that a boot record is not found.

I've got three drives in the machine: one Maxtor, two Western Digital, and
so choosing based upon model number helps me confirm which one is hd0/hda.

 -Don