LinuxQuestions.org - GRUB boot loader not loading

I have asked this question about 6 or more months ago...maybe less...I installed FC1 and everything went smoothly...I setup the partitions as follows:

Code:

/dev/hda1 ----- boot partition

/dev/hda2 ----- swap partition

/dev/hda3 ----- root partition

my system admin uncle at UNI (University of Northern Iowa) said that the partition setup seemed fine and that it probably wouldn't cause a problem...he has never used FC1 but he has used other flavors and is fairly knowledgable with computers....so when I installed, everything went fine...made the boot disk (thank god) and it said at the end of installation that I need to reboot...and to remove any media in any media drive....I took out boot disk and install CD...rebooted everything seems fine...except when it starts to load GRUB, I get an error of "Grub loadingStage2Read error" the Read error part shows up around 1-2 seconds after Grub loadingStage2 part.

After staying up all night sevral days in arow...I have guessed that there is a read error on the drive, if I boot using the boot disk everything runs just fine, there are however while booting small error messages about hda1 not being ready...it shows up about 4-5 times and then continues to boot normally...I am guessing that this is why GRUB will not load.

I have also tried to install windows XP pro...and when it told me to partition the drive it gave me 2 selections...NTFS quick and NTFS full....when I found this out I thought that my drive might be an NTFS only file system...but that doesn't make sense since I can boot into linux with the boot disk and do anything I want...I have already installed various software and games and they all work fine with no errors.

Since I have been working at this for around 6 or more months I have tried sevral things....one of those being have 2 drives, one drive with the boot partition, and the other drive having everything else...this worked just fine, except when booting the OS...I get the same error of hda not being ready, except that it's about hda and hdb not being ready.

I have downloaded Ultimate Boot CD and I have used the anti-virus program on it, and it said that the boot sector of the drive was clean...as it should be since the computer has never seen the internet...has never been connected to anything anywhere, so it's definitly not a virus.

Also on the UBCD there is partition managers...I have tried using "Ranish Partition Manager" and when I edit the partition tables it seems to work fine...when I try and save it says that it can't write to the MBR...I have run "/sbin/fdisk" and it gives me the same table format as Ranish Partition Manager...if I try and edit the table I get a write error or somthing like a write error, I am guessing that is saying it can't write to the MBR.

There are various things that I have left out that might be of importance in this post, one of them being that this computer is a bare-bones kit bought from tigerdirect.com, and that this was my first attempt at building my own computer...aswell as running linux on a computer that wasn't virutual (I had been running RH9 on VMware workstation for about a month).

I have also left out the hard drive specs...here they are:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7
Ultra ATA/100
120gb capacity
7200rpm spindle speed
2/3 disk heads
512 bytes per sector

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/...85,579,00.html

that link is all the info of the hard drive...the drive model number is ST3120022A (the 3rd column)

if you need absolutely any clarification on anything in this post please ask...if the post is a little long please say so and I will try and make it shorter...if you need any more info on my computer or any of the error messages please ask and I will post more information :D