While the vast majority of "grub hands at stage2" problems from FC3 were fixed in FC4, it seems that a few machines still experience this problem. This bug is split from Bug 139140 which is a confusing mess of different hardware and FC3/FC4 mixed reports. Please describe your hardware here ONLY if FC4's grub fails exactly in one of these two ways: 1) hangs on stage2 2) spontaneous reboot when it reaches stage2 http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=49276 DO NOT REPORT HERE IF YOU ARE USING FC3. Instead follow the procedure that I wrote here. Chances are it will fix your FC3.
Please also see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=154548 which appears (to me) as an anaconda bug (on FC4T2). When this occurs, grub is not installed in the partition (i386). This also occurred in a similar but different situation doing an x86_64 (fresh) install on the same system except that it appears more like the problem described here in that the install was all screwed up. To recover, I had to run rescueCD to set the MBR in my "system boot controller partition (grub/root/setup). I then rebooted the x86_64 rescueCD and had to run grub-install becuase nothing had been installed. The system is an opteron on an ASUS SK8V motherboard with two disks PATA on hda and a SATA which comes up as sda. Booting is off the hda drive with hda1 being a small system (boot controller) pointed to by MBR, hda9 being the i386 partition and hda10 being the x86_64 partition. fdisk -l /dev/hda: Disk /dev/hda: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 123 987966 83 Linux /dev/hda2 124 489 2939895 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/hda4 490 14946 116125852+ 5 Extended /dev/hda5 490 2314 14659281 83 Linux /dev/hda6 2315 4139 14659281 83 Linux /dev/hda7 4140 5964 14659281 83 Linux /dev/hda8 5965 7789 14659281 83 Linux /dev/hda9 7790 9614 14659281 83 Linux /dev/hda10 9615 11439 14659281 83 Linux /dev/hda11 11440 13264 14659281 83 Linux /dev/hda12 13265 14946 13510633+ 83 Linux I have another partition (hda11) which I can do another test install if there is something you want me to test. Once the install is complete and I fix everything up, it works fine.
Gene's problem should be fixed with Peter's change from last week... not seeing other reports here, I'm going to close this due to lack of information.
I ran into this problem with FC4 installed on a Compaq Evo D510 CMT I just acquired. GRUB would display: GRUB Loading stage 1.5 GRUB loading, please wait... and then hang. GRUB version is 0.95-13.i386. I discovered that if I substitute the /boot/grub/*stage* files from FC3 (grub-0.95-3.i386) and rerun "setup (hd0)" from the GRUB shell, then booting works properly.