(C'n'p of the same question asked by me on the Arch forums in case this turns out not to be Arch-centric, or people here happen to find a solution first.)

Using the pre-release core (i686) iso 2011.03.23 because the standard iso doesn't have the drivers to support my wireless device (though neither seems to have a driver for the wired interface, interestingly)

When at the 'Install Bootloader' step, it attempts to build the GRUB device map, then the arch installer quits, printing this at the bottom along with a console prompt:
Attempted to then run 'grub-install' from said console as follows:
I found I had to pass the root-directory argument, as otherwise it couldn't find the stage1 file.

This hard disk is not using raid in any way, and for reference has a partition layout as follows
/dev/sda1 ntfs as PQSERVICE
/dev/sda2 ntfs as SYSTEM RESERVED
/dev/sda3 ntfs as Acer
/dev/sda4 extended partition containing:
/dev/sda5 ext3 as /
/dev/sda6 swap

The first three were already present on the disk with Windows 7, which incidentally continues to boot without issue. The only modification made was to shrink the Acer (aka C:\) partiton with GParted to make room for Arch.

Would rather use GRUB than other bootloaders unless unavoidable.
Thanks for any help offered.

Where did you get the .iso from?

It seems that you are referring to the archboot iso

http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/archlinux/...hboot/2011.02/

although it could be a newer version generated by someone else.

Did you complete the install except for grub?

This may help: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=799930

and

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub#GRUB_Error_17

in this section: /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly

I got it from here: http://releng.archlinux.org/isos/
A thread I found on the Archlinux forums which seems to have vanished since, but I saved the link.

All parts of the installation worked perfectly - only GRUB failed.

I'm not entirely sure if the links are relevent, but that may be because I've never had to try anything like this myself.
Below is the output of fdisk -l /dev/sda. Maybe you can see something in it I can't.

You can just use super grub disk to boot arch and reinstall grub to the MBR from your arch install.

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub-disk/

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...r_installation

But... Grub isn't in the MBR in the first place. That's the whole problem - getting grub to install there.
Unless the super grub disk handles installing it differently, I have to admit I'm not optimistic about it's success chances... but I'll give it a go in the morning and see what happens.

That's ok. SGD will be able to boot your arch partition even if grub is not in the MBR.

No luck. Attempting to install SGD's grub and most attempts to boot Arch from it result in an Error 15, fstab not found.
Attempting to boot Arch by manually specifying the Grub menu.lst on Arch's partition results in a Partition not mountable error.

Just to make sure, you did select dev/sda0 to write grub to correct? I have installed Arch on a couple of different machines and never had this issue.

Is this the only distro you currently have on the HDD? In looking at your output for /dev/sda0 I'm not seeing where you have anything else installed.

What do you have on sda2 and 3?

All the best,

Ian

I'm certain, though I've always known is just /dev/sda instead of appending a 0.
Arch is indeed the only one on there.
sda2 and 3 are ones that came with the pre-installed Windows. 2 is marked as System Reserved, and I have no idea if it's necessary or not so I left it alone, and 3 is Windows 7 itself.
sda1, labelled PQSERVICE, appears to be some kind of recovery thing, again something I'm not entirely sure if I actually need or not, so it's been left alone.

Is your arch partition's /etc/fstab valid?

It should be. Will check again to be sure, but I recheck my fstab entries carefully.
It could be the cd/dvd entries I added in preparation for HAL later on, but AFAIK that shouldn't make a difference.

If they do happen to contain references to uuid's,change them to /dev/sdaX until you can get grub installed.

I don't trust or use UUIDs, despite any reasons for them. They're always set to the /dev/sdaX system, if nothing else because that way I actually understand it.
I did check it - besides the two HAL lines for cd/dvd, it's definitely valid.

Found to be a bug in the Arch Install Framework (Answer from Arch Forums).
Thanks for your help all the same.