THe recent versions of grub are no longer willing to load the initrd from 2.6 kernels claiming they are too big to fit in memory! Of course, this is pretty bogus - the grub image is about 650K compresses, 8M uncompresses and the machine has 16GB or RAM. If I repackage the image (the current image is only 21% full) into a 2MB ext2, grub still complains. On the other hand, the 2.4.20-18.9 image left from earlier days (and created using the tools in exiting Raw Hide at that time) - 600KB compressed, 5MB uncompressed loads correctly. Earlier versions of grub did not have this problem (OTOH because of bug 112906 I was not able to run "install-grub" after grub upgrades for quite a while, so I have no idea when it broke), even on the exact same entries that it refuses to load today.
Hmmm... I wasn't noticing this problem on my box when I was doing test installs on Friday. Will look further.
Do you have >= 4GB of memory?
As I said, this machine has 16GB.
Woops, I can't read today. Passing mem=4096M (or less) should work.
In fact, mem=999999999M works, oddly enough.
Worked around in grub-0.94-3.... I still think the kernel is being bogus.
Confirming, WFM with grub-0.94-3
Reopening. This bug is now occuring in latest trees of FC6-Test3 on x86_64 with >4GB ram. Entering mem=<4G in the kernel cmdline args allows the machine to boot properly.
Can you see if this still happens with grub-0.97-12 ?
*** Bug 207045 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 206876 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Appears to work (0.97-12) on my HP dc-7600 with 2.5 GB or RAM. Previously, I had to specify "uppermem 2000000" to get it going.
After reading these comments, I added mem=4096M to the kernel command line in grub.conf. Now grub boots properly, no complaints about initrd. *shrug* (This is on a dell precision 690 with 4GB of memory, x86_64, fc6 test 3, grub-0.97-12, various kernels.)
This should be fixed back with 0.97-12
I have Intel DQ965GF motherboard (version CO96510J.86A.5493.2006.1102.1728) and Pentium D CPU. With 512 MB grub works (boots Linux kernel 2.6.19 and memtest.bin OK). With 1024 MB grub does not work (boots Linux kernel 2.6.19 but with memtest.bin I get "Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory."). I made .iso which I boot from PATA CDRW, and my other disk is 160 GB PATA hd. I haven't had floppy drive for 8 years, so I can't tell would grub work from a floppy. What do you have to say about the patch to memcheck() ? http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?3404
I have grub-0.97-13.