Grub hangs after printing only "GRUB"...

[Jeff McAffer]

Hi, I hope someone out there can help...

I have been installing Redhat 7.2 (with Grub) on an IBM 325 server.  The
install goes fine until the end when I reboot the machine.  Then literally
all I get on the screen is

GRUB

at the top left of the screen.  I'm serious, this all I get.  Keystrokes
have no apparent effect.  This happens right after the machine's POST
completes.

OK, so here are some details of the machine etc.

Hardware:
- IBM 325 PC server (2x address@hidden, 512MB RAM, ...)
- On-board AIC7880 SCSI controller (set to boot device with id: 0)
- Promise PCI ATA100 ide controller
- 3x IBM DCHS04U 4GB SCSI drives (Geom: 548/255/63) (SCSI ids 0, 1, 2)
- 1x IBM DTLA-307030 IDA ATA100 drive (Geom: 3737/255/63) (lone master on
IDE1)

Software
- RedHat 7.2
- Grub-0.90-11
- ext3 filesystems
- separate /boot partition

Explanation:
I followed the standard RH install process and selected GRUB when asked for
a bootloader.  Since the IDE card/drives are not recognized by the BIOS as
boot devices, I opted to install Grub in the boot partition of the
first/boot scsi drive (0).  This gave me the less than optimal results
described above (GRUB in the top left corner).

Then I booted from a floppy and installed Grub into the MBR of the boot
drive (0) manually.  I did this using the technique from the ln -s . boot
technique from the faq.  find /boot/grub/stage1 worked fine and reported
(hd1,0) (hd0 seems to be the IDE drive even though it is not on the system
board...) The setup command executed and reported success.  Reboot the
machine and still no joy.  The BIOS Virus detection did however report that
the MBR had changed.

I also noted that the 7880 SCSI controller may have some issues with LBA and
int13 extensions.  After trying all of the above I disabled the int13
extensions and rebooted. This time I simply got "GRUB GRUB GRUB ..." printed
continuously on the screen.

I hope this is enough informaition.  Is there a way I can get more debug
info or find out more about what is actually going on?  For now i am booting
off a floppy but that is not so great a story.  While I am confident that it
is a configuration problem of some sort, I am unable to navigate all the
variables.  I searched the web quite a bit but did not find anything
particularly promising.

Thanks

Jeff