Yet another GRUB on AMD64 booting problem

[fattylumpkin]

I recently upgraded to an Athlon 64 system, and was excited about the prospect of installing a native 64-bit Gentoo on it. So I promptly fired up the ol' install disc and went through the goods. I set up my Fedora Core 1 (64-bit) GRUB to boot my Gentoo system directly. No joy. The screen would say only "Booting 'Gentoo'" and "root (hd0,5)" (where Gentoo is installed), and display a blinking cursor. No error messages otherwise.

So I went back into the installer and set up grub-static on my root partition, then chainloaded from the FC1 GRUB. No joy. Fine. I go back into the installer and install Gentoo's GRUB to the MBR. Still no joy.

FC1 GRUB will boot FC1, WinXP, and SuSE just fine, but seems to hang up on Gentoo.

I definitely have a kernel in the /boot directory (no separate /boot partition), and I'm specifying the right root option in the kernel line, so I don't know what's wrong. I wish it would give me an error message.

One other possibly relevant bit of information is that autocompletion in GRUB does not seem to work. I'll try to autocomplete, and then GRUB will hang. Could that indicate a problem?

Oh yes--and one more thing. When I was installing SuSE, it insisted that my drive is /dev/hde. This drive is the only hard drive in the system, the master on the primary controller. It does have SATA RAID, but I'm not using that. FC1 and Gentoo both call the drive /dev/hda. Is this relevant, or at least relevant to GRUB's inability to autocomplete?

Finally, I don't know if this is relevant, but I thought I'd mention it. In the install process, after building my kernel, I'm unable to do a modules-update command. It just gives me an error that it could not generate /etc/modprobe.conf. I've looked through the various threads on this forum about that issue, but none seem to be particularly relevant to me. I don't have any weird entries in /etc/modules.d/, for example.

Here's the relevant part of my FC1 GRUB, just in case:

title Gentoo
root (hd0,5)
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/kernel-2.6.5-gentoo-r1 root=/dev/hda6

I've read through some of the amd64-specific GRUB threads, but I don't know how relevant they are to my situation, because most people seem to be using SATA drives, and people seem to be using genkernel--but I'm building the kernel manually. As far as I know, I'm doing things right. If there was a kernel problem, I would think it would at least begin to boot the kernel.

Thanks for any suggestions you may be able to provide!
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"Donuts: is there anything they can't do?" -Homer J. Simpson

[jdong]

Are you sure your kernel is good?

[fattylumpkin]

Nope, I can't be sure the kernel is good, but I built one using genkernel, and didn't configure it very much. That kernel didn't solve the problem either. One thread somewhere around here mentioned something solving a boot problem by including some BIOS firmware driver--and I haven't checked that yet. I'll try it and post back here if I get some results.

The reason I didn't really suspect the kernel is that I've built kernels for
Gentoo many times before without problems (although not on this machine, and not 64-bit), and I figured that if there was a kernel problem it would at least start booting the kernel.

Anyway, onward troubleshooting.
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"Donuts: is there anything they can't do?" -Homer J. Simpson

[fattylumpkin]

Well, still no luck after building yet another kernel, and even trying vanilla-sources.

I'm beginning to think it's a more serious problem than just a misconfigured kernel. I decided once again to install GRUB to the MBR, and the install succeeded, but when I tried to boot from it, it would just hang after it said it was loading stage 1.5.

Does this illuminate anything? Any insights?
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"Donuts: is there anything they can't do?" -Homer J. Simpson

[fattylumpkin]

Ugh. Well, I'm beginning to think that my hard drive is buggered. I've been having problems for a while now that I thought were not related to the hard drive. For one thing, when I'd boot from the Windows install disc, the screen would go blank after the "Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration" message. I always used to be able to boot from my Linux install discs, but now I can't--unless I've disconnected the hdd from the system. Even the Maxtor drive diagnostics/utilities disc won't boot.

So... a hard drive steadily going south would probably account for my GRUB ills, huh... Sigh...
_________________
"Donuts: is there anything they can't do?" -Homer J. Simpson

[fattylumpkin]

Zoiks! Yet another post by me. I just successfully installed Gentoo on a different drive (removed the original one), and it's happily compiling xorg-x11 now.

Yet again Gentoo shows how it most readily points out hardware flaws...
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"Donuts: is there anything they can't do?" -Homer J. Simpson