GRUB incompatibility with my hardware or partition table?

[Cesar González Revilla]

Hello All,

I am trying to install grub on my system without success. Here follows what i 
done.

grub> geometry (hd0)
drive 0x80: C/H/S = 59560/16/63, The number of sectors = 60036480, /dev/hda
   Partition num: 0,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
   Partition num: 2,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x82
   Partition num: 3,  Filesystem type is reiserfs, partition type 0x83
   Partition num: 4,  Filesystem type is reiserfs, partition type 0x83

Ok ,the "fdisk -l /dev/hda" output ;

# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 59560 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1        27     13576+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2         30713     59560  14539392    5  Extended
/dev/hda3            28       319    147168   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4           320     30712  15318072   83  Linux
/dev/hda5         30713     59560  14539360+  83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

hda1 is mounted as /boot, hda4 as /, hda5 as /home and  hda5 is a logical 
partitition (reiserfs) and hda4, hda1 primarys.

When I try to install grub as follows :

grub-install --root-directory=/boot '(hd0)'


And the instalation succed and the grub images files get copied to 
/boot/boot/grub, /boot/grub is a symbolic link to /boot/boot/grub, BUT when 
the system boots grub hangs up saying GRUB unlimited times.

I have tryed to install grub in a floppy (grub-install '(fd0)') and when I 
boot the system GRUB says :

GRUB Geom error

--------
NOTE : cat /proc/ide/hda/geometry
physical     16383/16/63
logical      59560/16/63
---------


¿Can anybody say me what i am doing wrong? 

My hardware specifications :

K7 Athlon 1 GHz
Asus motherboard (A7A266) with the last bios update (v. 1009)
IBM ATA100 30 Gb HD (model IBM-DTLA-307030)
256 RAM DDR
...
...

And my system is :

Debian GNU/Linux Woody
kernel 2.2.19 with reiserfs support.
GRUB 0.90

the /etc/fstab file:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>  <dump>  <pass>
/dev/hda1       /boot   ext2    defaults                        0       0
/dev/hda4       /               reiserfs        defaults,notail 0       1
/dev/hda5       /home               reiserfs        defaults,notail 0       2
/dev/hda3       none            swap    sw                      0       0
proc            /proc           proc    defaults                        0    0
/dev/fd0        /floppy         auto    defaults,user,noauto            0    0
/dev/cdrom      /cdrom          iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noauto         0    0


I have try to install grub manually and no errors reported but GRUB hangs up 
the same maner.

I can only boot my system with the boot floppy with lilo.

Thanks in advance,

-- 
César González Revilla
Eureka Sistemas 
http://www.eureka-sistemas.com/
+34 (9)42 233937


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