I’ve been attempting to install 11.1 with GRUB going in a 321Gb /Boot sda2 (sda1 is Vista, and an extended after sda2 has 2Gb /swap , 60Gb /Home and 16Gb / [root].
Twice it has happened that my orders are ignored and MBR is overwritten so Vista is unbootable.
I now have to think that this is a fault with the installer. The threads relating to this seem to get hijacked by GRUB lovers who cannot imagine anyone not wanting GRUB on the MBR.
It seems to me that if the installer cannot reliably place GRUB on a custom partition, then the option should be removed. >:)
If you set up to boot from a custom partition like e.g. sda7 and Suse’s menu appears when you boot the computer, then Suse has obeyed your orders and booted from sda7.
Must agree with swerdna here. I’ve seen Grub-install fail miserably half-way through (not so rarely), but have yet to see it messing up another partition - unless inadvertently told so.