fc3, fc4, fc5, grub

[Chuck Sterling]

A month ago I tried to replace (not upgrade) fc3 with fc5 on my 1.7Ghz 
P4 PC. It used grub to boot fc3 or WinXP Pro, and worked fine with fc3. 
When I installed (not upgrade) fc5 I had it install grub. After, the 
system would get to the point where it displayed "GRUB" and stopped. Not 
a prompt; the system was locked up and would not answer the keyboard. 
The next thing that it normally would have done, IIRC, is display 
"Loading Stage Two" or something to that effect, then the boot screens. 
I did not troubleshoot it or try to fix it at that time, I just 
reinstalled WinXP since it was about time anyway, and did without Linux.

Later, I wound up with an older PC, a 350Mhz PII, back from my daughter, 
and I reloaded WinXP Home Edition to clear the thing out and start over. 
It had one 20GB IDE drive and I installed another one to load Linux. I 
installed fc5 on the second drive and wound up in the same place as on 
the other PC. Reinstalled WinXP (later found out that was not 
necessary). Tried installing fc4; same problem. But I had read some 
messages here and made notes on grub.conf. Then I got it running by 
installing fc3 and its grub boot loader; the WinXP was undamaged and 
both would boot and run. I had done a minimal fc3 installation to save 
time, and then did an upgrade to fc4. Still boots okay. A few minutes 
ago I reinstalled fc3 with all the packages. Still boots okay. Tomorrow 
I may upgrade to fc4 again and see if it boots. If it does I will 
probably do yet another upgrade to fc5 and see what happens.

Ramble, ramble...

Anyway, I looked over quite a few messages here and did not find any 
that talk about stopping between stage one and two, unless that's what 
folks are talking about when grub finds a bad grub.conf or does not find 
one at all. I compared the grub.conf that was installed with the broken 
fc4 and the working fc3 and they both look the same to me. Something 
else I guess. I don't get it...

Is this a common problem that has already been solved? If so, someone 
please point me in the right direction and help me to get the system 
running and understand what is going wrong. Until this happened to my 
second PC I thought it was just a machine problem; now I'm thinking 
software and I'm probably not the only one.

Best regards,
Chuck Sterling