This is a strange problem. I don't need help fixing it since I am not using JFS at the moment. The reason why is, like I said, strange.

I went to install Debian 40r3, Ubuntu 8.04.1 and Xubuntu 8.04.1 (as well as a few others.)

I wanted to try JFS for a change. I hear it was better then ext3. After I installed the operating systems it grub refused to install anywhere on the partition I chose.

I use GAG for my boot manager, it just makes things easier on me when I have Vista, XP, etc. So I always install which ever Linux OS I am using on the root partition, for example /dev/sdc3. But GRUB would not do it with JFS. So I reinstalled everything with ext3 and it works fine.

Is there a reason why this happened? Has anyone else had these issues? Did I miss something?

Also, Suse 11 with JFS did worked fine and Grub installed on the root partition. I just stopped using it for other reasons.

I am now using Xubuntu 8.04.1 with ext3, though I would have liked to try JFS in the future. Maybe for 8.10 if I can figure out what was wrong.

Well, according to:
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/d...9/ch08s04.html
It's not recommended to have grub boot into a JFS partition, though I'm not sure why.
What I did to overcome the problem is quite simple, and allow you to have one single boot partition for multiple distribution: just reserve some few 100Mb somewhere for a small ext3 boot partition, and put you root with any exotic filesystem your kernel support.
I'm personaly using jfs for the root partition on my home server, and it goes very well. One of the advantage of jfs over ext2/3 is that it does not allocate the inode in advance, thus avoiding hogging a lot of space for nothing.

For example, if you do not pay attention, formatting 250Gb with the default settings on ext3 will reserve something like 20Gb for inodes (?), if my memory does not trick me, which is of course way too much.

Thanks. I didn't know that about Grub and JFS. Good idea. When I reinstall things later I will do that. A few hundred mb for the ext3 boot partition and then the root on jfs. I just need to change a few things. I have several partitions and only three hard drives, two sata and one ide. I wish there was a way to have more then four primary partitions, five would be nice.

That's weird, I didn't know that either, but I've been using GRUB and JFS for quite some time now and I've had no problems. But I agree that if you dual-boot you should make a common boot partition of type ext2.

Maybe what they mean is don't install GRUB on the superblock of a JFS partition, the same is recommended for XFS, it's best to install it to MBR if possible.

This can be fine-tuned if you format from the command line, of course.You can go as low as 1%.

Oh, I know that and use it regularly for my external USB drive, but it irks me somehow that this is statically allocated for you, and that the default is wrong for big drives (i.e more than 100 Gb).
Maybe the future ext tools are going to pay attention to this ?
I'll try and see where a bug/feature request can be submitted.