Fedora 9 install troubles - big

[Wim]

Roger Heflin wrote:
> Ric Moore wrote:
>> On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 10:21 +0200, Wim wrote:
>>> Hi Ricky and Ric,
>>>
>>> The problem is that GRUB just hangs and I can't even get into 
>>> Runlevel 3 fedora boot, let alone set GRUB parameters or other 
>>> parameters :(.
>>>
>>> I find it hard to believe that Fedora couldn't handle 8 gigs of RAM.
>>>
>>
>> There were several posts awhile back having problems with 4 gigs. You're
>> dual booting and have no problems with Windows?? Ric
>>
Indeed I don't have any problems with it. In fact before I tried to 
install Fedora I was dual booting between Windows XP SP3 (which of 
course can only see 4 GB of RAM) and Windows Vista SP1 64-bit Business 
(which uses the full 8 gigs). This was done with the Vista bootloader 
and worked flawlessly.

> Typical grub problems won't have anything to do with memory, grub 
> needs very little ram so it is very doubtful it is trying to use 
> anything but the very tiny bit of the low memory.
>
> I have seen lots of machines hang because of too much ram, it has 
> never been in grub, and it has always been much later in the boot 
> process when it did hang, and I have on previous kernels ran machines 
> up to 64G.
>
> How grub hangs should give you some idea of what the failure is, 
> generally this means that something about the hard disk setup is not 
> correct, or something more basic like a bios issue.
>
> Check out a grub debugging page and see what it means that only "grub" 
> is showing on the screen.
>
> You should also be able to boot with the DVD and let that boot into 
> the already installed system to at least look around.
>
> Reinstalling with the exact same process is likely to not be useful.
>
> Did you use a small /boot partition?
>
>                        Roger
>
Yes I used the Default layout from Fedora which creates a 200 MB /boot 
partition (/dev/sdb1).

As a small update: Harald Hoyer from Redhat hinted to boot the installer 
with the VESA option which gave me the graphical installer I wanted. I 
reinstalled Fedora from the graphical installer but still no go with 
Grub. Alo I noticed during the install that I couldn't add the 
Additional Software Repository (or something).

I can get to the system by booting the DVD in rescue mode however, so if 
anyone knows some good /etc/grub.conf things to help me out, feel free 
to shoot. I'm reading the GRUB manual as we speak in hopes of finding 
something that can resolve this problem.

Regards,

Wim