I am having many problems with the grub bootloader. I would get a distro version of linux installed fresh on a hd and then grub would work for like the first time and then just bring up GRUB loading statge2read error. It did this to me first with fedora 1, and then suse 8.1, and now my fedora 3 also. It seems very flaky that it works for just a little bit and then continues to refuse to load. I swap around hds a lot, I have about a dozen floating around that I am constantly trying a fresh install of a distro and most of the time it works first few times, then refuses. I normally just run the hd that I want to boot from as a single drive on primary ide on mb, but also does the same thing with primary of my ide card. Once when I had a slave with the master drive all of a sudden one worked again, but only just that once, otherwise always get that error.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

would I be better off using lilo?

No. You would not be better off getting lilo. You would be much better off getting you s**t organized!
If you insist on swapping out HDDs randomly, then designate one, and only one, as the master, and leave it alone!
Install grub to the MBR of that one.
Swap out other HDDs at will, then edit the grub.conf or menu.lst (depending on the distro on the master) to point to their respective disks and partitions.

Yeah, I know that I should get things orginized into one booting drive, but I am experiementing with different distros with realtime linux and the easiest way I saw it was just swapping out drives. Is there something really wrong with switching drives? I thought would just go to the current MBR and use that no matter what the previous MBR was, and apperently it tried, but for some reason always seems to fail. In all of this surprisingly my windows hdd works perfect every time while any linux is always flaky. I think I'm done installing distros now so I will settle it down, but for future use what is wrong with changing the boot drive?