The boot menu for the live CD let me boot from the first disk. I was able to run grub under the native system. I did everything up to rewriting the MBR and then started worrying about that. I just restarted the machine and got my grub menu. I took a little longer than usual to come up, but seems to be behaving normally.
I could be having some heat issues; it's well over 100F in my room here. I think I need a better fan in front of the drives at least.
If I have to rewrite the MBR later for some reason, do I rewrite it the the first disk in the chain or the one with grub boot/root on it? I have 3 SATA disks on it.
Thanks,
Hugh