GRUB hangs immediately after jump from stage1.5 to stage2

[Sean Kormilo]

Hi,

I'm trying to get the following system to boot using GRUB:

System Details:
System is Intel E7501 chipset based, with an LSI logic LSI53C1030 SCSI adapter.
Dual 2.0 GHz Xeon CPU's, 8GB of RAM
146GB Seagate SCSI drives

I've tried many variants of 0.95 (with the FC3 patches) as well as 0.97. I've made sure that there are no untoward CFLAGS being set, etc.

For every combination I've tried, it always hangs the system on the jump from stage 1.5 to stage2. I added some grub_printfs - one immediately before the "chain_stage2 (0, 0x8200, saved_sector);" call in stage1_5.c. I see that printf run OK. I then added another grub_printf immediately before the "grub_setjmp (restart_env);" call in cmain of stage2.c. I do not see it get printed out, so it appears that the hang is happening as part of the jump into stage2.

The same versions of GRUB boot up fine a similar system (HP CC3310 w 4GB of RAM - also E7501 based, but with an Adaptec SCSI driver, 72GB hard drives).

I then decided to compile up pxegrub - since these systems were already setup to boot over the network. pxegrub works fine on the HP boxes - I get the GRUB command line. When I try booting up the other system, it hangs as well - I don't see any output. So it related to the disks, given that I can't get a GRUB commandline to show up over the network either. I tried pxegrub on a board without any disks attached (but otherwise the same hardware as the one with the 146GB disks) and it also behaves the same way - pxegrub downloads, but then the systems locks up without anything showing up on the display.

A couple of data points - the pxe version of grub-1.92 DOES startup on the system - I'm able to get the command line, and attempt to boot Linux (which fails with a "kernel too big message.") but at least it gets that far. pxelinux works OK, and LILO works OK - when it's not giving me 99 99 99 errors.

Any ideas as to where I should go from here? Are there any other places I should think about putting debug output? I'd very much prefer to use GRUB on this system vs LILO.

Thanks!

Sean.

---

Sean Kormilo
Typhoon Software Architect, Nortel

heisenbug: /hi:´zen·buhg/, n.
[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics]
A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it.