GRUB hangs at "GRUB loading, please wait..."

[penetrode]

Hi all:

Had a second hard disk in three months explode on me (avoid the Western Digital WDxxxJB series drives, I am not alone), and now I am having to rebuild my Gentoo system.

Install is basicallly complete. I can boot the system from a GRUB floppy.

When I do a hard disk based boot, I get:

"GRUB loading stage 1.5."

"GRUB loading, please wait..."

Then a hang. There are no errors.

At first I thought it might be a stupid cylinder problem, so I created a /boot partition about 50 Mb in size, about 50 Mb into the disk. That has not resolved the problem, so it's not a disk addressing issue (the BIOS fully supports the drive - a 120 Gb Seagate - anyway, and grub seems to recognize all the sectors).

So, here's what we know:

System is bootable -- it boots fine from a floppy
GRUB can see the partitions (setup (hd0) works like a charm)
e2fsStage1_5 is loading fine, or we wouldn't be getting "GRUB loading, please wait..."
It appears that Stage 2 is not loading. Changes to grub.conf are having no effect (for example, adding debug has no effect), which would indicate to me that GRUB isn't even getting to the point of loading the menu.

The absence of any error messages is not at all helpful. If there had been errors I would have had the problem resolved myself by now.

HALP

[idoneus]

sorry to tell you but it seems this is a dup!
Check out this thread, I hope it will solve your problem.
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[penetrode]

You didn't provide a link to the thread

Anyway -- the problem was that emerge was building grub with the CFLAGS in /etc/make.conf; compiling GRUB with CFLAGS is bad news, apparently. Take CFLAGS out, like so:

CFLAGS="" emerge --verbose grub

and everything works.

Enough people have had this problem that it really should be mentioned in the install.html file, don't you think?