[conspire] Good coverage of the common technical issue regarding GRUB2 , but...

[bruce coston]

I suspect I actually encountered the won't write the first 500 bits of data problem in grub 1.99 ; but , I was wondering about why the word didn't get down to the bundlers of recent distro' s . I expect they would all assume such an old bug , Jan of 2011 , with such severe effects on such a large fraction of hardware would get fixed . I suppose the other bug , you covered it very well [ The bug you covered does focus on an inherent booting problem so admitting it causes less pain of cognitive dissonance . ] , and the developer orientation of debian would socially mask the problem .  The project seems to like their current president . I think it's an interesting social problem . It does take time to find the bug reports and people unfamiliar with LLILO may tend to just hope the other stuff got fixed . People buying amd boxes don't spend extra to resemble the intel boxes at work , thus they typically won't get through some rescue procedure beyond the
 basics of the grub2 rescue console . 
I will have extra trouble booting my hd. install of SWIFT linux 0.2.0 due to my bios problem , so just installing another distro higher on the disk didn't work . SWIFT seems to already have installer doesn't run problems . None of the things on Omni-boot that I tried worked either , there's so much on Omni-boot that something probably  ' can ' fix it . I'm sure it's just laziness that causes the recent bundlers to just ship bad hd. bootloaders instead of substiting  LILO . I should go LILO if I ever boot that install as different versions of grub2 seem to detest each other . I may not bother as I probably need to change  initrd. too , even if just changing the version of grub2 . 
: Putting it bluntly : debian didn't replace grub2 like knoppix did due to a social failure . 
 - Best wishes - Bruce