Problems with booting SuSE 9.1/9.2 from harddrive using GRUB have been touched upon below.

New computer (AMD-64, ABIT motherboard, Maxtor 80 GB 7200 rpm harddrive), SuSE 9.2 fresh out of the box are "the usual suspects." Installation from DVD fails. (Safe Settings gets to Formatting... and hangs. Partitioner had complained about disk geometry but Custom Partition would make it go.) Likewise 32-bit selected, 32-bit from CD, and FreeBSD 5.3.

SuSE 9.1 DVD 64-bit, DVD 32-bit, CD 32-bit and SuSE 9.0 DVD (32-bit) all installed, but would not boot from harddrive (hang with "GRUB..." on screen). Would boot from DVD/CD through Installation, Manual--so the thing is doable. No joy using a boot partition or LILO.

In the course of fooling around with the FreeBSD distribution, I tried installing it on a second harddrive (Maxtor 5.3 GB 5500 rpm) which, "mirabile visu," booted from hdb through the boot manager on hda! Switching the 5.3 GB harddrive to master allowed the installation of SuSE 9.2, booted normally from harddrive to a perfectly working system--except the BIOS would not detect the 80 GB drive as Slave.

The question is, should I buy the MSI motherboard (our "purchasing agent" got a deal on a bundle and did not get the specified board) or a different brand, or less capacious, hard drive?

Try modifying your LBA settings on the BIOS for the drive. I don't recall, frankly, if I turned it on or off, but I had a similar problem and switching that made it all sing.

Others are more knowledgable than I. But I got here first.

Thank you. Timeliness does count.

When the Partition routine complained about the disk geometry, it was set to the BIOS default CHS addressing 39236/16/255 (track/head/sector). Resetting to LBA 9964/255/63 did move the installation along, but SuSE 9.2 still hung up after Formatting and SuSE 9.1 still hung in GRUB.

Were you using a hard drive as capacious as 80 GB?

In fact, I believe that mine was exactly an 80...

Is the Grub you are getting a nice pretty graphics screen, or just a text jobbie that says something instructive like "Grub>"?

tdonoughue:
I got "GRUB" and "GRUB om..."
I did not get a prompt ">" to invite editing the bootloader.
I looked through /boot to see what might be seen there. The links to vmliniz-2-6-8-default and initrd-2.6.8-24-default seemed correct.
I could not find source files for these on the B disk, and am not sure what I could do with them if I could.
May I ask what processor and motherboard you are using?
Thank you very much.

Is this a mixed-controller system (like P-ATA and S-ATA together)? Then it may help to boot with the grub option ide=reverse

Sometimes the BIOS assigns another drive order than the Linux driver does, so the bootloader can't find it.

abisko00:
I am going to remove the 5.6GB drive and concentrate on trying to get SuSE 9.2 to install through the AMD-64/ABIT motherboard on the 80GB hard drive.
No confusion about the drive order.
Should work now.
Shouldn't it?
Thank you very much.

Sorry, got your problem wrong.
I don't see why not.
But maybe you should wait until someone can talk from own experience

I did get it to work after all.
I removed the second hard drive to make the drive order unmistakable as abisko00 mentioned.
I reset the CMOS using the jumper provided.
I powered up the computer and went through the setup entries, including selecting the LBA view of the hard drive as tdonoughue suggested.
The system installed as nicely as you could want. The Partition entry in Configuration proposed hda1 swap and hda2 / so I didn't have to mess with it. No GRUB reared its ugly head on the reboot or the final boot, but the boot selector showed an "Other 1" and "Other 2" in addition to the expected options.
"My Computer," showed four partitions, hda1 thru hda4. The two extra partitions turned out to be the boot and root of the SuSE 9.1 that had been previously installed.
I had to reinstall, and specifically delete the spurious partitions.
It is very disconcerting to have the machine do unexpected things, on its own, without warning, and give a false indication of where the trouble lies.
Thank you all very much.

(sorry. work got messy and I was away for a bit. moot point now, but I have a native Sony Vaio PCV-7732 box to which I added an extra 80MB hd. but very glad you got it to work. congrats and enjoy!)