[gentoo-user] Re: Grub problems

[Jeff Cranmer <jcranmer01@earthlink.net>]

I am trying to bring up a new Linux unit (my old desktop died on Thursday).
My hardware is an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard, running an Athlon X2 3800+ Dual core processor.

I have a serial ATA 250GB hard drive which I am attempting to install my OS into.  The hard drive maps in the bios to SATA4, and maps within Linux to /dev/sda.  

I also have two other parallel IDE dard drives, connected via a raid controller (though not configured for RAID) to Drive numbers 0 and 3 on the RAID controller.  These drives map to hde and hdh respectively, with a DVD writer mapping to both /dev/hda and /dev/dvdrw.

The bios is configured to boot first from the DVD (primary IDE master) then from the 250GB SATA hard drive.

swapspace is on /dev/sda2,  /boot is on /dev/sda1, and root is on /dev/sda6

I am running genkernel

After I configure grub, and install grub to the mbr using grub-install, the reboot fails, with GRUB doing nothing but display the text 'GRUB'.

Evidently, either I am doing something wrong at the grub-install stage, or there is a problem with grub.  I have had a similar lack of success with Fedora Core 6 and Mandriva installs (same problem).

The boot partition is an ext3 filesystem

My grub.conf file is as follows:

default=0
timeout=30
splashimage=(hd0,5)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.17-r8
  root (hd0,5)
  kernel /boot/kernel-genkernel-x86_64-2,6,17-gentoo-r8 root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc ramdisk=8192 real_root=/dev/sda6 udev vga=0x318 video=vesafb:mtrr:3,ywrap doscsi
  initrd /boot/initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.17-gentoo-r8

When I run grub-install /dev/sda, it reports no errors.  

The device.map file contains the following
(hd0)      /dev/sda
This file was generated by the fedora installation (possibly the source of the problem?).

Update:
>After a little bit of surfing, I tried the command grub-install --recheck /dev/sda
>That changed the device map file so that the /dev/sda drive mapped to hd2
>
>The full /boot/grub/device.map listing is now
>(fd0)   /dev/fd0
>(hd0)  /dev/hde
>(hd1)  /dev/hdh
>(hd2)  /dev/sda
>
>I edited the grub.conf file so that the splash image and root lines reference (hd2,5), then re-ran grub-install /dev/sda.  Still no joy.  On boot up, the screen stays blank for a while, then every 10 seconds or so, it adds another " GRUB" text element to the screen.  No sign of any boot-up activity.

Any suggestions gratefully received, as I'm trying to get this system working by the end of the weekend.

Thanks in advance

Jeff
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