I made a GRUB floppy using this process, I see the following when I boot the floppy:
Then it simply hangs. If I install linux to a hard drive along with GRUB, the hard drive boot gets the same error.

This machine has no problems booting SBM-based code, like the SBM floppy, or XOSL from the HDD. But both LILO and GRUB cannot boot. The problem has to be pretty fundamental, because the GRUB floppy is just a couple binary files w/out a configuration.

From the GRUB manual itself...

Error 17 :
Cannot mount selected partition.
This error is returned if the partition requested exists, but the
filesystem type cannot be recognized by GRUB.

More information is needed from you.

Which distro are you trying to boot?

What steps did you take to partition and format the drive before installation, or during the installation of said distro?

does this problem persist if you install grub the 'normal' way on the floppy ?
(root (hd...), setup (fd0), look up the devices in the devices.map in the grub folder)

I tried it with both EXT2 and EXT3 volumes.
This is DSL linux. I partitioned the drive as follows:
/dev/hda1 linux (type 83)
/dev/hda2 swap (type 82)

Then I ran mkswap /dev/hda2, followed by dslinstall. The DSL install went fine, and I chose LILO and GRUB each on different attempts. On other hardware, this automated approach has worked.

I was expecting the boot floppy to work, because it doesn't depend on the hard drive even being present. AFAIK, the floppy should just bring me to a GRUB> prompt.
In the documentation, there is a 'natural' approach, and a 'grub-install' approach. I followed the natural approach to make the boot floppy- downloaded the latest GRUB Legacy from CVS, compiled it (on a different machine), and used 'dd' to create a floppy from the stage1 and stage2 files. I didn't have to do anything with devices.map or those devices that you list. After doing a 'configure && make' the stage files are ready to go.

you were saying in your first post that your hd-install of grub already failed. If I understand you correctly, you then rawcopied the misconfigured binary files onto the floppy (according to the link you posted). This cannot work as this method assumes a proper configuration of grub.

Please post the content of menu.lst and device.map. Both are located in /boot/grub

cd /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc

sorry, my mistake, I have overseen this line in your link. I assumed you were copying the files from /etc/boot.
You want to use a completely unconfigured grub. You are right, the grub prompt should show up when booting from the
floppy created this way. Forget what I posted above ...

I actually created the floppy twice. The first time, I grabbed the already built stage files from /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc of the DSL installation, and got the error 17. The second time, I downloaded the latest CVS version and built it on a running machine. I imaged the clean unconfigured stage files to a floppy, which still resulted in the error 17. So I'm puzzled as to why I can't boot such a generic version of GRUB and get a GRUB shell.

BTW, this is a strange machine when it comes to booting. It cannot boot a bootable CD either - not without circumventing the BIOS. To boot a DSL linux CD (which uses ISOLINUX), I must boot a SBM floppy, and then select the CD drive from the menu in order to boot the CD.

You guys probably never would have guessed what my problem was: The HDD geometry was erroneously set in the BIOS.



Linux distrusts the BIOS drive geometry, thus ignores it. I never thought to make sure that the geometry was properly set in the BIOS. Even though the BIOS thought the 428.1MB drive was 2421MB, fdisk still saw the correct size - so I didn't suspect any addressing problems. Well GRUB and LILO must have be trusting the BIOS. Once I corrected the HDD geometry, GRUB worked correctly.

I wonder if GRUB 2 will be fixing this. AFAIK, there is no reason to trust the BIOS.

In case someone else runs into this with LILO, the error was a lengthy repitition of "99 99 99 99 99 99".