The 1024 number of cylinders is reported in many Linux programs too. I wouldn't worry about it in Grub as that isn't what is actually used. I do use Grub to boot systems at the rear end of 1.5TB disk which has some 182,400 cylinders.

I have Grub booting up to 130 partitions, 126 of which are logical, in one disk so I can confirm Grub is very reliable for the standard Ext2/3, ntfs, Fat16/32 partitions. The 130 partitions are not recognised by Linux programs like fdisk and cfdisk programs either but they are supposed what the new kernels after 2.6.28 are capable of.

wreckgar23,

There are some BIOSes out there that report the boot drive as (hd0) regardless of which drive the OS sees it as.
On multi drive set ups such as yours, when you set the BIOS to boot from the first drive, you get what you expect, its reported to grub as (hd0)
When you set the BIOS to boot from the second drive, its reported to grub as (hd0) i.e. Your drives appear to have swapped. When the kernel boots, normality is restored.

You can test this from the grub menu by seeing how grub sees the drives as you boot from each drive in turn.
All you are interested in is the partitions on each drive.

Thanks again for all the responses.

grub does now recognise logical ext4 partitions. I removed and recreated the partitions with gparted from the jaunty livecd, which took a while. the latest ubuntu grub was then able to recognise the partitions, and I was then able to install jaunty onto the ext4 partition successfully.

It basically seems like, at the first attempt, the jaunty installer made a mess of creating the extended/logical partitions

Now to get wlan working on 9.04

cheers