Fedora 9 install troubles - big

[Roger Heflin]

Wim wrote:
> 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


It won't be a grub.conf issue, unless you are actually getting a grub prompt and 
can type stuff on it, it will likely be something wrong with grub not finding 
the stage1/1.5/2 files.    Boot rescue and check the devices.map file and see if 
the order of the disks looks ok and if there is anything extra in it, or just 
change around the order of the disk and do a "grub-install" and try again.   The 
first stage is found by the bios, then that stage needs to find the next stage 
(1.5) and the 1.5 stage needs to go from there.

How many hard disks do you have?

                                     Roger