8.10 AMD64: After installation w. custom partitioning "Missing Operating System"

[NDLunchbox]

I am rebuilding a Dell PowerEdge SC440. It has two HDDs in it, 160GB and 80GB. The box is a webserver that multiple users have shell accounts on. I wanted to beef up the security and implement quotas and other measure to keep one user from accidentally hosing the machine, so step one was to do some more advanced partitioning. I created the following Partitions on the 160GB Disk (the 80 is for backups):

SDA1 /boot 256 MB
SDA2 / 10 GB
SDA3 /usr 12 GB
SDA5 SWAP 3072 MB
SDA6 /tmp 4096 MB
SDA7 /opt 20 GB
SDA8 /var 30 GB
SDA9 /var/log 10 GB
SDA10 /var/www 30 GB
SDA11 /home 40 GB

I loaded used the "fix a broken system" option to get into a shell and run fdisk. /boot has a star showing it is the boot partition, but when I cd into it, the directory is empty. Same with most of the above directories even though they are shown as being mounted.

What am I doing wrong? I though you just need to set the mount point and the installer will take care of the rest.

Is that too many partitions? I'm thinking about cutting it down to just:

/
/var/log
/home
/tmp
and SWAP

[NDLunchbox]

Well, still no love on this. I cut down the partitions to:
/boot 100 MB
/ 36 GB
/var 80 GB
SWAP 3072 MB
/tmp 4096 MB
/home 30 GB
/var/log 6 GB

Still would not boot - so I tried using the default partitioning... STILL NOT BOOTING.

I thought maybe because this disk was once part of a server that had software RAID and then VMWare ESX 3i on it the MBR could be messed up or unrecognizable, so I installed Windows XP - no problems.

Again, tried to install 8.10 over it (wiping out XP) and now I am getting:

Error loading operating system

What is going on here? Can anyone help?
Thanks...

[Ferret-Simpson]

Try Hardy. On my Proliant Systems, grub just insn't working on Intrepid. Hardy is not an issue.

[NDLunchbox]

Actually got it to boot (using defaults, going to try custom partitions again).

Here's what I think happened and what I did:

Either the VMWare ESX 3i installation (running VMFS on two disks) or the Software RAID the disk was part of before 3i was installed wrote something funky to the MBR. Even installing Windows XP and then installing Ubuntu over it did not clear the problem.

Nuked the disk with DBAN and it seems to have cleared the problem.

[NDLunchbox]

Confirmed: A quick wipe with DBAN fixed the problem. Must have been some, and I no longer got "Activate RAID" warning before the partitioning part of the Intrepid install.