Many thanks for people's suggestions so far...
Yes - I have checked that there are no other disks causing a problem. I have played with the ordering of boot drives; I have run the fedora installation cd in rescue mode. I played with all possible permutations of how to set up the boot configuration, but everything gave the same result. The trouble is I don't really know what I'm looking for. The grub.conf looks like others I've seen while trawling through Google, so I assume it is OK.
I will have a go with the suggestion below tomorrow:-
I had troubles before using drives that were used fro the first time before. I set the /boot partition as active and things worked alright. Do you have a partition set as active on the primary disk?
This seemed to be a BIOS expectation and not one of the operating system being installed.
Jim
--
<change_m2> Will LINUX ever overtake sliced bread as the #1 achievement
of mankind?