So I think I have a pretty good idea of this, but I'd like some confirmation before I mess with my MBR.

I first installed Ubuntu, and installed grub to the MBR. Back in January I started using Arch, and now use that primarily. Since now Arch is going to be my main stable distro, with my Ubuntu partition turning into my experimental partition, I'd like to be able to have grub associated with Arch.

I know I can do grub-install in Arch and reinstall grub, and then I suppose I can copy my menu.lst easily enough. I'm wondering if there's a better way though.

I was also thinking it would be good to have grub separate from any distro I'm using, to avoid this issue in the future. I'm thinking to make a separate boot partition, which can be mounted by whichever distro I'm using. Would this accomplish what I'm wanting to do? One problem with this I'm wondering about is if any kernels I get through my distros might have problems being in the same folder (same name or something like that)?

You could have a (very small) partition that only had grub on it. The kernels would not have to be in the same place and could be separate for your different distros. This grub partition could be anywhere on a hard disk and would not have to be a primary partition, so long as the grub stage 1 in the MBR knew where it was.

Curiously, you could probably also re-use the same kernel for different distros - just define a different root directory when you call the kernel in menu.lst.

Thanks bernied. I didn't even really think about putting grub in it's own partition, I guess that would work too. I was thinking about if the kernels could be shared as well. Didn't really think it would cause problems, more a matter of keeping track of things from kernal packages that might get installed.