How can I change this grub configuration so that it works?
 

Hi all, it's taken me about a week to get puppy onto my CPU, but I've finally done it, Yay!

Problem is I can't get Puppy to boot from the hard drive. I've tried reinstalling Puppy and Grub together and reinstalling Grub on its own, but to little avail. I managed to get Error 18 to go, but I'm left with a Grub that just hangs after stage 1.5. I know there are a LOT of threads about this but I don't know much about Grub (it usually configures itself) and I'm not sure what I can change without messing things up. I don't think my menu.lst file is correct and when I go into the 'boot' folder I have the Grub folder but I also have 'vmlinuz' next to it, should this be there, or should it be elsewhere? I've only got Puppy on the hard drive and the other drive is my USB stick which I had to get my floppy to find because of bios limitation, does this affect anything?

Here's a copy of my menu.lst (it looks a little messy, I think). Like I said I'm not dual booting so I don't know why the Windows option is there, and I don't know what the correct syntax is to change it all (I don't want to delete something that's needed by Grub).

# GRUB configuration file '/boot/grub/menu.lst'.
# generated by 'grubconfig'. Fri Mar 20 16:11:26 2009
#
# The backup copy of the MBR for drive '/dev/sda' is
# here '/boot/grub/mbr.sda.3476'. You can restore it like this.
# dd if=/boot/grub/mbr.sda.3476 of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
#
# Start GRUB global section
#timeout 30
color light-gray/blue black/light-gray
# End GRUB global section
# Linux bootable partition config begins
title Linux (on /dev/sda1)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro vga=773
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# Other bootable partition config begins
title Windows (on /dev/sdb1)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
# Other bootable partition config ends
title Install GRUB to floppy disk (on /dev/fd0)
pause Insert a formatted floppy disk and press enter.
root (hd0,0)
setup (fd0)
pause Press enter to continue.
title Install GRUB to Linux partition (on /dev/sda1)
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0,0)
pause Press enter to continue.
title - For help press 'c', then type: 'help'
root (hd0)
title - For usage examples, type: 'cat /boot/grub/usage.txt'
root (hd0)

Any help or suggestions getting this mess sorted are very welcome. I'm a bit worried about how long the floppy will last and I'll not be able to replace it if I can't boot.

P.s Puppy should be the standard installation on all newly purchased CPU's, not Windows.

If you can boot from the floppy, then ... are your hard disks getting swapped?

Change the grub entry to

title Linux (on /dev/sda1)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro vga=773

title Linux2 (on /dev/sda1)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro vga=773

You can delete the rest... try both

Okay I've just tried the following combinations, I changed that entry on its own with both variations. I then deleted everything and tried both variations separately and both together. I still get the same thing, it hangs just after stage 1.5.

I don't think the drives are being swaped because my bios does not support booting from USB, and I disabled booting from floppy before testing the new changes.

The drive I'm trying to get Grub working on is sda1, it has all the folders in it and I can save to it no problems. Its marked as bootable but it just will not boot.

Solved! (kinda)
 

I've managed to get Grub to work, it turns out Dell's no good!

I was trying to get Puppy to install onto a PII with 64MB of RAM. Every time it loaded it wanted to do it all in RAM, which was NEVER going to happen. I then tried installing it onto a Dell with 128MB of RAM, this was successful as it loaded and I managed to install it to the hard drive, problem was it would not boot from the hard drive no matter how much I tried, only from the USB via the floppy.

I ended up putting the hard drive back in the PII, and it turns out grub is fine, its doing its job and all is well.

So if your having trouble installing Puppy because its loading all in RAM and you don't have enough (HIGH MEM Failed is the error I kept getting). If you can, try installing it with another CPU then switching back the drives.
Worked for me and at last I have a working PC.