Years of Debian esperience, new to SL, 3rd  attempt at installing 5.4.

I specify that grub should be installed in the root partition, in my case

/dev/hda4.  I use GAG as pure boot selector, each OS has its own bootload
er
on-partition.

Due to history, /dev/hda4 is the second primary, right after hda1 on the 
disk.

I decline to rearrange partition order, and also decline to add other OS'
s
to the SL grub boot menu as proffered by installer.

On 1st boot I consistently find no bootloader on /dev/hda4.  Other OS's b
oot
fine.

Booted rescue twice, chrooted to root partition, I see the fileysytem whe
re
it should be - i.e. the system seemingly doesn't get confused by partitio
ns
not being in order.

Attempted this:
          grub-install /dev/hda4

I repeatedly get this message:
          error reading stage 1

I failed to find references to this on the list.
Is this a known problem?
Did I miss something in the archives?

TIA!