Initially, I totally failed to get grub to do anything. This was
because I was building it under redhat 5.1, with tools which say:
gcc version 2.7.2.3
GNU assembler version 2.9.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu), using BFD version 2.9.1.0.4
This builds a totally wrong stage1, with no warning at all. Code
offsets wrong etc relative to downloaded binary versions. I would
suggest putting in something to prevent this trap!
Anyway, I switched to compiling it under release debian slink, and
that at least seems to produce the same binaries as the distributed
versions.
Since then, in a very few minutes at odd times over the last couple of
weeks I've still been fighting with grub trying to get it to work. I
can install enough on my hard disk to boot to the grub command line,
but I can't get it to read the menu.lst file. When trying to use a
stage1.5, I can't even get it to work at all, which I interpret as
failure to read stage2, perhaps for the same reason as stage2 fails to
read the menu.lst. But menu.lst is right next to stage2, and during
install it finds stage2 fine. This is on a small 100MB partition at
about 600MB in the disk, well below 1GB. I've tried both 0.5.90, 0.5.91,
version from cvs, and version from cvs with patches for large disks
recently posted here.
One thing thats really hindering is its silence. Surely it would be worth
having each stage at least announce itself as running, so one can see
whats going go. At least a Grub 1 1.5 2.. type of output. And some
kind of message about the menu file.
But anyway, does anyone have any hints as to what the problem might
be, before I dive into instrumenting stage2/stage1.5 and find out whats
really going on?
