Description of Problem: After installing and selecting GRUB as the bootloader on a Gateway E-3400 workstation and booting, first stage appears to load okay from the MBR, second stage hangs with the floppy drive light lit. Don't get to the GRUB splashscreen. HD and boot MBR is /dev/hda, floppy on /dev/fd0, CDROM on /dev/hdc. LILO seems to work fine. One apparently identical machine, except configured with its only hard drive on /dev/hdb, and no /dev/hda, booted. BIOS is an AMIBIOS 7.00.xx, BIOS version is 01.00.P06 08/17/00. These machines are off-site; I should have access to them again the week after Thanksgiving.
Does lilo work fine if you have the lba32 keyword in the lilo.conf?
I did some more thorough testing and came up with the following results. If the hard drive is the master (/dev/hda) and there is nothing as the slave, LILO boots fine with either "linear" or "lba32". GRUB stops at "Loading stage2..." with the floppy drive light solidly lit. If the hard drive is the slave (/dev/hdb) and there is nothing as the master, GRUB boots fine. LILO stops at "L" with the floppy drive light solidly lit, using either "linear" or "lba32". GRUB correctly mapped /dev/hdb to (hd0) in this circumstance. So, it turns out this problem affects both GRUB and LILO. Hard drive was a Quantum Fireball LM20.5, using cable detection to determine whether it's a master or a slave. Floppy drive had no disk inserted.
The usual fun question is do you have the most current BIOS for the machines installed?
Heh. According to the owners, yes. There's several possible BIOS types on E-3400 machines according to the Gateway site, but it looks to *me* that there might be a P07 revision they missed from 9/2001. Google also found another report of this bug with GRUB on an E-3400 in November 2000, in the bug-grub archive: http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-grub/2000-November/004030.html This user claimed disabling the floppy controller in the BIOS allowed GRUB to boot normally. There was no follow-up, but maybe he knows something more.
ould you try the test package at http://people.redhat.com/~katzj/grub/. If you install the package and then run `/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda` (or wherever you have grub installed other than /dev/hda) and let me know if that works any better?
Others claim that this works much better on similar hardware
Same issue on Intel ISP1100 server iron, which is a 440BX chipset machine. Disabling the floppy drive in the BIOS permitted booting. Would be nice to see an errata fixing this for RH7.2, rather than Rawhide. On servers, updating to the latest RedHat is deadly. Waiting until a release has been out 6 months is much safer, but we REALLY rely on RedHat supporting the releases in the field. This means marking things fixed in Rawhide is suspect.