Howdy all,
I recently obtained a few IBM Intellistation M Pros w/ Dual Xeons. I'm planning to turn these into webservers so I can retire my old IBM 600mhz server which is running Debian, not that there is anything wrong with it, it serves up everything lightning fast....anyways....

I originally tried installing Mandriva 2009 on the M Pro's SCSI HDD, because I heard it was a pretty easy to use server distro with wizards and whatnot. After installing, I got the "GRUB Hard Disk Error" which I then thought to be Mandriva conflicting with something on the system, so I then went into the bios, disabled any net booting, and anything that would affect it from booting correctly, or so I thought. When that didn't work, I took the SCSI out and put a IDE HDD in there, figuring it could have been something with the SCSI HDD or chipset that was impeding a good start.

After putting the IDE HDD in there, I downloaded the new version of Debian, and proceeded to install that, everything running fine, until I needed to restart to boot for the first time. I was greeted with the "GRUB Hard Disk Error."

Not sure what's going on here, but this is very frustrating and I've been trying to figure this out for the past few days with no avail.

Can anyone shed any light on the situation?

EDIT: I also wanted to note that when Debian asked me to install GRUB to the MBR, I hit yes.

EDIT2: I downloaded and burned Super GRUB Disk, and booted that up. I went through the menus until I got to the option that said "Boot MBR from HDD" it loaded the Debian menu up fine, but I'm not sure what to make of the situation here.

Does it really seem like an GRUB issue?

Since you can boot your HDD just fine with the Super Grub Disk, to get a Grub Hard Disk error is probably due to how you have your HDD configured in BIOS. Is your BIOS the latest version? If not, upgrading your BIOS is probably the first thing I would try. If that doesn't immediately solve the problem, how about going into your BIOS and let me know what HDD-related BIOS settings you have like "auto-detect", LBA, CHS, RAID, AHCI/HCI/EHCI vs. IDE, IDE-emulation, legacy IDE, native IDE, ACPI, DMA, etc.

As far as the IDE settings in the BIOS:

IDE Drives Setup:
On Chip Primary: Enabled
On Chip Secondary: Enabled
IDE Primary Master PIO: Auto
IDE Primary Slave PIO: Auto
IDE Secondary Master PIO: Auto
IDE Secondary Slave PIO: Auto
IDE Primary Master UDMA: Auto
IDE Primary Slave UDMA: Auto
IDE Secondary Master UDMA: Auto
IDE Secondary Slave UDMA: Auto
IDE HDD Block Mode: Enabled

I disabled the OnBoard SCSI to help isolate the problem, with the eventual intention of using the SCSI drive after I get this working properly.

Start Up Sequence:
First: Floppy
Second: CD ROM
Third: HDD

Hard Disk Boot Priority:
1. Primary Master WDC WD80EB-28DFH2 - my ide hdd
2. Bootable Add-in Cards

System Summary:
IDE Pri Master: 8003MB
IDE Pri Slave: NONE
IDE Sec Master: Hitachi DVD-ROM
IDE Sec Slave: LG CD-RW

Looks like the BIOS settings are good. I don't know how to make BIOS update disks in Linux, and none of my other PCs have FDDs.

Any ideas?

I saw once where someone solved a Grub problem similar to yours by turning off UDMA for the drive in BIOS. How about trying that and let me know if it makes any difference.

No dice.

I'm currently using the SGD to boot because I need this server running ASAP. But in terms of attempting to fix the problem, I also tried using the SGD to repair the MBR and GRUB, and still doesn't work. I have the same problem with the SCSI HDDs, so I'm not sure where the problem lies.