GRUB loading stage 1.5.

[jweller]

this is my first go with gentoo but I've been using RH/fedora for a while and I work a lot with embedded linux systems.


machine is AMD64 X2 4200+
gigabyte ga-m61pm-s2 MB
onboard video and sound
2 500G SATA drives in raid 1 config - MB has an onboard RAID controller

I went through the basic install and tried to stay as close to the AMD64 handbook as possible. about the only thing I changed was I used -O3 instead of -O2. on first boot I get:

"GRUB loading stage 1.5."

over and over. I never get an error, so I can't look up the code in the grub manual. never goes to a prompt or anything. just the same message until I cycle power on the box.

I have tried a lot of things to no avail. So far I have:

removed floppy as a boot device in bios - this machine does not have a floppy.
removed fd0 from my device.map
CFLAGS="" emerge grub
emerge grub-static
redid the entire install using -O2
tried any number of combinations in my grub.conf


when I try and manually configure grub, tabbing for autocomplete does not work. So I'm basicly taking my best educated guess at what it should be. This strikes me as possibly a problem, but emerge grub does not have any errors at the end, so I'm not sure what it could be.

my grub.conf

default 0
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=gentoo linux 2.6.18-r6
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/kernel-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.18-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/ram0 init=linuxrc ramdisk=8192 vga=0x318 video=vesafb:mtrr:3,ywrap
real_root=/dev/sda3 udev
initrd /boot/initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.18-gentoo-r6

couple questions

1)Is there an issue with booting from a SATA RAID array? I haven't seen anything to indicate that there is.
2)could this be an issue with my kernel. I'm thinking that I would get an error later on from grub if there was but I'm not sure.
3)could this be a hardware problem? this is a 100% new machine, just assembled it. should I just go through a quick fedora install to make certain that it boots properly. I hate to go back and do that if I don't have to but I left myself a lot of unformatted space on the HD if I need to. It boots just fine on the gentoo CD so I'm 99.9% certain it isn't a problem.
4)this is the most likely one - what have I screwed up in my grub.conf? I have tried just about everything i've read on the internet already, but I'm willing to do it again.
5)I've read that lilo isn't supported for the amd64, but if somebody can assure me it works, I'll go that way. i'm not married to grub.


I'm trying to convert my wife to linux, and get that last win box out of my house. This is not helping

[gruven]

If you are using software raid (which you probably are since it is on your motherboard) then you will have problems with grub. Another problem is that you are using genkernel. I would recommend compiling your own custom kernel, and that way you can compile the filesystem and raid drivers directly into the kernel. Of course, that is only a suggestion.

Here is a link on the gentoo forums with a similar problem. It may help you: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...grub+raid.html

Also, I would stick with O2 as O3 is known to make larger and slower binaries for some things.

[jweller]

thank you. that link has some good stuff in it, I'll try some things when I get home tonight.


I am planning on compiling a custom kernel, but I decided to just use genkernel since this is my first try. I made getting a bootable kernel my #1 priority and I figured that genkernel would give me the best chance of that.

[gruven]

I never really had any luck with genkernel, and prefer to just download the sources from kernel.org and patch/compile them myself, so that no matter what distro I use, it is always the same.