[TriLUG] HELP! FC2 install on Thinkpad fails to boot.

[Rick DeNatale]

My wife has an orphaned Thinkpad A21e on which Win98 got clobbered.
Since we don't have any Win98 CDs I decided to install Linux on it. 
I'm having problems getting it to boot after the install.

FIrst off, this machine's only network interface is a wi-fi card,
which I expect I'm going to have fun dealing with AFTER I get Linux
installed, so network installation doesn't seem to be a viable option.

My first thought was to use the Fedora Core 2 disk which I picked up a
this month's meeting. However, since the TP only has a cd drive, and I
can't figure out how to make cd images from the DVD I needed to go to
plan b.

I had the DVD from the August Linux Format magazine, which does have a
means of creating isos using jigdo.  So I made all five cd's. The
magazine did have a sidebar which said that media check wouldn't work
on these, and it doesn't.

So I plunged ahead.  First I did a workstation install. When it
finally completed though, rather than booting I got a "Missing
Operating System" message.  I tried again, and it was the same story.

Playing with the rescue disk, I couldn't find a kernel nor grub?!?

Googling came up with some suggestions to change bios settings to make
sure that the disk was lba format, but this machine doesn't seem to
have any bios settings relevant to the disk.

I also ran across someone with a similar problem who said that after
he installed a minimal system he could boot, and then re-install a
fuller system successfully. So I installed the minimal FC2 config, and
voila, it booted. Then I tried to upgrade the installation.

But the upgrade option only seems to do version upgrades, no options
to add more packages. So I tried to install over the same partitions.

This left me with a system which booted to a grub prompt.  Not knowing
that much about grub, I found some documentation and tried to get it
to boot, but no luck. I thought that maybe I needed a bigger /boot
partition, so I'm now trying to re-install with a bigger one, but
thought I'd ask y'all for ideas.

Looking at what had been installed I found that /boot contained
  initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
  vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358
  System.map-2.6.5-1.358  - or something like that, I didn't note the
exact file name
  rhinstall-stage2.2.6.5-1.358.img again I didn't note the exact file name.

/boot/grub contained only splash.xpm.gz  

I Looking at the setup on my RH9 box, I mistakenly COPIED the vmlinuz
and initrd files to /boot/grub.
I then ran grub with that configuration and got
grub>root (hd0,0)
   response that this was e2fs
grub>find /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358
   (hd0,0)
grub>find /initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
   (hd0,0)
grub>quit

 I then made a /boot/grub/grub.conf which looked like this:

default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core 2 (2.6.5-1.358)
          root (hd0,0)
          kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358
          initrd /initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img

Then I tried to boot, and it now just displays
GRUB
in the upper left corner of the screen and doesn't seem to be
listening to the keyboard.

I then thought that maybe the rhinstall-stage2* file needed to be in
/boot/grub since there are some other stage2 files there on my RH9
system. When I tried to cp it, I ran out of space on the boot
partition, which made me think that just maybe that's the problem, so
now I'm reinstalling as I said above.  Of course, I really don't need
the initrd and syslinuz files in /boot/grub...

But if that's NOT the problem, does anyone have any other ideas?