I am trying to get a frind of mine set up with linux for the same time, installation worked well on his IBM iSeries thinkpad (1161 72j) -this is a japanese laptop as it is his girlfriend's....
Anyhow, I could not get the Grub to work for booting into linux even after a BIOS Update the error is - GRUB hard disk error-

Nevertheless, if I start the laptop with the SUSE 1 installation CD, and just let it boot from hard-disk, the Grub is fine and I can boot w/out problems...

The latest IBM bios is still very crappy and do not let you see any configuration for the hdd, other than the serial number, hence I cannot manually set the size of the hard drive or even see the values from the BIOS and compare them with the fdisk entry...

Any help would be highly apreciated as this is my friend's first try into linux world.

I am a newbie (1 year running SUSE) myself but have been able to resolve every installation prblm to date. So any help as to how to go about this one would be GREAT!