HELP: Error Message Installing GRUB on CF card.

[Grant Forrester]

I am trying to install Grub on a Sandisk 16Mb CompactFlash card using an IDE
adapter.
When I try and boot from the CF Card I get the following error.

Verifying DMI Pool Data........
GRUB Loading stage2Read Error


Can anybody help me shed some light on how to resolve the problem?

The history of how I set up the card is outlined below. Apologies for the
length of the email.

I really would be grateful for any help or pointers.

Thanks in advance
Grant Forrester


System: Via ITX ME6000 mainboard
OS: Redhat 7.3
Primary Master: Excelstor 20Gb HDD
Secondary Master: Sandisk SDCFB-16 + IDE Adpator


BIOS
----

Inspection of the BIOS reveals the CF card has been correctly identified as
the master device on the seconday ide channel. The properties for the card
are given as:

size: 16Mb
Cylinders: 490
Heads: 2
Sectors: 32


FDISK (v2.11n)
-----

On booting the full Redhat installation on my main HDD (/dev/hda) I can
inspect and set the partition table on the CF card (/dev/hdc) using fdisk as
follows:
$ fdisk /dev/hdc

Disk /dev/hdc: 2 heads, 32 sectors, 490 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdc1   *         1       490     15664   83  Linux


MKE2FS (v1.27)
------

The single partition on the CF card (/dev/hdc1) is then formatted as an
ext2fs filesystem as follows:
$ mke2fs /dev/hdc1

mke2fs 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=1024 (log=0)
Fragment size=1024 (log=0)
3920 inodes, 15664 blocks
783 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=1
2 block groups
8192 blocks per group, 8192 fragments per group
1960 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
        8193

Writing inode tables: done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 28 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.


The filesystem can then be mounted on /mnt/flash and inspected as follows:
$ mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/flash
$ ls /mnt/flash

lost+found


Copy GRUB and boot files
------------------------

All the files found in my Redhat /boot/grub directory are then copied to the
flash folder /grub as follows:
$ cp -R /boot/grub /mnt/flash
$ ls -l /mnt/flash/grub

-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          101 Jan 27 20:49 device.map
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        10880 Jan 27 20:49 e2fs_stage1_5
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         9808 Jan 27 20:49 fat_stage1_5
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         8896 Jan 27 20:49 ffs_stage1_5
-rw-------    1 root     root          667 Jan 27 20:49 grub.conf
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        11104 Jan 27 20:49 jfs_stage1_5
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           11 Jan 27 20:49 menu.lst ->
./grub.conf
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         9280 Jan 27 20:49 minix_stage1_5
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        12576 Jan 27 20:49 reiserfs_stage1_5
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        33585 Jan 27 20:49 splash.xpm.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          512 Jan 27 20:49 stage1
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       131008 Jan 27 20:49 stage2
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         8544 Jan 27 20:49 vstafs_stage1_5
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        12744 Jan 27 20:49 xfs_stage1_5

The kernel and initrd images I require are then copied to /mnt/flash. (I
have successfully booted from these images using a temporary grub boot
option in my existing Redhat install /dev/hda so I know they work).

$ ls -l /mnt/flash

drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         1024 Jan 27 20:49 grub
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      8388608 Jan 27 20:53 ice3.img
drwx------    2 root     root        12288 Jan 27 20:44 lost+found
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      1041347 Jan 27 20:53 vmlinuz-2.4.18-3


Do GRUB magic (0.91)
-------------

Start the grub console and wait for the BIOS probing to end.
Available devices detected are (hd0) HDD and (hd1) Sandisk CF card.
The GRUB session is as follows.

grub> geometry (hd1)
  drive 0x81: C/H/S = 490/2/32, The number of sectors = 31360, /dev/hdc
  Partition num: 0, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> root (hd1,0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd1,0)
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
 Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd1,0)"... failed (this is not fatal)
 Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd1,0)"... failed (this is not fatal)
 Running "install /grub/stage1 d (hd1,0) /grub/stage2 p /grub/grub.conf "...
succeeded
 Done.


Reboot
------
On reboot I switched the boot order in the BIOS to start with HDD1 (ie the
CF card) rather than my disk (HDD0).  I get the error 'GRUB Loading
stage2Read Error'.

I even tried removing my existing HDD and plugging the CF card into the
primary IDE channel making it HDD0.  Resetting the BIOS to boot from HDD0
results in the same error message.

Any help please?