Boot displays just one dot and hangs - LBA48 during grub2-install and old BIOS during booting

[Juhani Jaakola]

The IDE hard disk of my old IBM R50p laptop failed, so I replaced it
with a new IDE SSD (model PA25-32). I booted with a Fedora 28 LXDE
live USB stick and installed Fedora 28 to my new SSD. When I try to
boot, the system displays just one dot (a period) in the top left
corner and hangs. I have to use the power button to reboot from that
situation.

When I boot again with Fedora 28 LXDE live USB stick, I can see that
the files in the new SSD are intact. I tried to re-install GRUB
several times, but I get always the same results, except if I use
option "--disk-module=native" then boot hangs but it displays two
dots!

In the live USB stick I can see that the SSD is in LBA48 mode:

[   10.059225] ata1.00: ATA-9: PA25-32, 20150807, max UDMA/133
[   10.059228] ata1.00: 62377984 sectors, multi 0: LBA48

The BIOS of my R50p is 1RETDIWW (3.14 ) and EC is 1RHT71WW-3.04. The
BIOS is dated 20 Jan 2005. As far as I know, the EC (Embedded
Controller) firmware is the latest possible and the latest BIOS was
published 18 Jun 2007. The BIOS change logs do not show any changes to
booting or handling disks.

I have written details of my struggle to FedoraForum.org posting:
https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?319160-Boot-displays-just-one-dot-and-hangs

It seems that booting proceeds the longest time when I use
"--disk-module=ata" but it still hangs!

My theory is that when I install GRUB (with the live USB stick), the
disk is in LBA48 mode. But when the system is booting and loading
parts of GRUB, the BIOS is not using LBA48 mode. So the disk geometry
is seen in different ways during installation time and booting, which
causes GRUB to read garbage and the system hangs when executing that
carbage???

Any ideas? How can I debug this?

Regards, Juhani Jaakola