The installation process itself went whacky.

The boot drive on my cpu was on /dev/sdb so I had to go in and change the bios order.

So I set grub during the installation process so that it sees /dev/sdb1 as windows xp and /dev/sdc1 is automatically seen as Linux (that's where the installation is), and it installs.

Boot the system back up, and right after POST, it says

GRUB

and hangs.

I have no USB drives attached to here.

How do I get Grub to stop hanging?

try using rescue disk.

reinstall bootloader with : /sbin/grub-install [boot-device]

I've been trying for days to install Fedora 9 on my 2nd HD (with XP on my 1st). When I installed Fedora, I specified "b" for the install and "a" for the "boot from" device. It wrote GRUB to the windows drive. When I booted I got "GRUB _" (cursor flashing) hanging there.

My solution -- it turns out that my BIOS had the secondary drive on the primary bus set to "OFF". When I set it to "AUTO", then GRUB successfully ran!! I'm guessing that GRUB needs the BIOS to be aware of the existence of the 2nd drive (makes some sense) where Fedora 9 is installed.

I'm using a Dell Dimension 8300.

Hope this helps someone else!

(Now if I could only get that wireless network card working...darn!)

I suspect this has to do with setting the option in your BIOS to LBA or Large. I just need to remember what the actual option is called.

Well, I think I found the source of the problem.

My (internal, non-USB) boot hard drive is the third hard drive on the list as seen by BIOS.

All my installers - RedHat, Ubuntu, etc. - see the boot drive as /dev/sdb.

The drive Linux is on, is an internal non-USB drive /dev/sdc (sdc1).

So I set Grub to install on /dev/sdb and boot /dev/sdc1, and then when the computer reboots, it hangs at GRUB.

This happens no matter what distro I install.

Where do you see whether the BIOS has the secondary drive set to "off"? Off for what? Thanks!

Well, this is how I solved my problem.

I went back to booting the Fedora 9 install CD, and at the boot loader screen I told the system to install the bootloader at /dev/sda, which is NOT my Windows XP boot drive.

I went into BIOS and told the system to boot first off what I knew to be /dev/sda, and whammo, I got the GRUB graphical boot screen and booted into Linux.

If you don't see another post right away it's because Windows XP also booted up just fine off /dev/sdb.

My theory? GRUB needed to boot off /dev/sda, period.

This is interesting. I am very new to Linux, but I recall when I installed Fedora 9 recently (on sda) there was an option to choose which hard drive I wanted to boot from - sda or sdb (my XP / Ubuntu boot under Windows on sdb).

I chose sda since I wanted to keep the systems / hard drives separate - but assume I could have chosen sdb? Perhaps I might have messed things up if I had tried that? Wow!!

Right now I am happy being able to boot Fedora or Xp/Ubuntu by interrupting BIOS and changing boot priority

Well, IMO, it depends on what system you're doing it on. Or, actually, which bios.

Since I did this, I found that in other computers I have, the freaking thing will boot into Linux by doing what I did, but then it won't boot back into XP. You have to rearrange the boot order in order for XP to boot. But the computer I was using when I posted this thread, doesn't have that problem.

So the saga continues... to find a working solution for all cases...!