Fedora Core 3 Boot Hangs at Grub loading stage2...

[Phil Schaffner]

On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 11:19 -0500, Paul_Malone at kywb.uscourts.gov wrote:
> ... snip ...
> I would like to be able to dual boot XP and Fedora.  I want to use the
> Windows XP boot manager, a boot floppy for Fedora, or a boot CD for
> Fedora.  I do not want to overwrite the Windows XP boot managers with
> Grub.  The kernel seems to be too big to fit on a floppy.  Is there a
> way to make a boot floppy?  What about a CD?

[root at tabb1 ~]# mkbootdisk --help
usage: mkbootdisk [--version] [--noprompt] [--device <devicefile>]
       [--verbose -v] [--iso] [--kernelargs <args>] [--size <size>]  <kernel>
       (ex: mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd1 2.0.31)
[root at tabb1 ~]# rpm -qf `which mkbootdisk`
mkbootdisk-1.5.2-1
[root at tabb1 ~]# uname -r
2.6.9-1.678_FC3
[root at tabb1 ~]# mkbootdisk --verbose --iso --device boot`uname -r`.iso `uname -r`
Installing isolinux... done
Copying /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.678_FC3... done.
Copying /boot/initrd-2.6.9-1.678_FC3.img... done.
Configuring bootloader... done.
[root at tabb1 ~]# ll boot*
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 2197504 Nov 11 20:44 boot2.6.9-1.667.iso
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 2203648 Nov 20 20:45 boot2.6.9-1.678_FC3.iso

Burn to a CD and reboot.

No specific suggestions about your grub problems.  Nothing obvious, but
I have had grub problems in the past when grub did not see the same disk
ordering at boot time as at run-time when configuring booting - on a
system with ATA-66 IDE, HPT-370 IDE-RAID, and Adaptec SCSI.  Using the
grub "find" command on files like /grub/stage1 and /etc/fstab in both
situations and comparing the (hdX,Y) results helped me construct
a /boot/grub/device.map that could be used to install grub after
starting it with

# grub --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)

where hd0 was /dev/hde without the device.map and /dev/sda with it.

I don't use Windoze bootloader and would recommend grub, so can't help
you there; searching the list archives should yield some enlightenment.

Good luck.