Grub core dumps when trying to make boot floppy

I have been building a vendor neutral linux installation on a secondary hard
disk and now I'm ready to make it bootable by its own boot floppy. I compiled
and installed grub-0.97 and 0.95 with identical results. When I enter

grub-install fd0

the script will create the needed files in (hd1,4)/boot/grub/* but the section
of the script that runs the grub shell and executes

setup {params} (fd0)

to put the stage1 boot loader on the floppy and direct stage2 to
(hd1,4)/boot/grub dumps with a segmentation fault.

I thought that maybe the stage1_5 for jfs was buggy so I tried using a different
partition and formatting as reiserfs and ext3 but with identical failures.

What the fsck is going on?

here's the trace from the grub-install script

+ rm -f /tmp/grub-install.img.10278
+ rm -f /tmp/grub-install.log.10278
+ test -n ''
+ /usr/sbin/grub --batch --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map
/usr/sbin/grub-install: line 459: 10419 Segmentation fault
$grub_shell
--batch $no_floppy --device-map=$device_map >$log_file <<EOF root $root_drive
setup $force_lba --stage2=$grubdir/stage2 --prefix=$grub_prefix $install_drive
quit EOF



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