Grub and disk images

[Eric S. Johansson]

I am in a bit of a quandary  because I'm not sure if grub is involved in my 
problem or not.  I am trying to produce compact flash images of IP cop without 
actually running the IP cop installer.  So far, it looks pretty good.  I think 
I'm at a point where I think I'm mostly done.  with a couple of commandline 
options, a workable baseline image is created, I can preconfigure an image with 
an existing configuration file and I can even boot under qemu.  I'm almost 
tempted to try and run my firewall etc. under QEMU because it's cheap and easy 
but I'm not going down that rat hole today.  :-)

the failure to boot makes me think I screwed up how I install the boot 
information with grub.  Here's a list of what works and what doesn't:

components:

CompactFlash
CompactFlash to IDE adapter
CompactFlash to USB adapter
physical system
virtual system (qemu)

What Works:
qemu with image file, CompactFlash with USB adapter

what fails:
real machine with CompactFlash with IDE adapter
qemu with CompactFlash with IDE adapter

in each case, the failure gets to the point where it's trying to boot and it 
never gets any further than the blank screen after the BIOS message goes away. 
I do have a flash image built using a rather laborious and time intensive 
technique that does work and I derived my solutions from that original technique 
so I know the basic technique is viable.  What that problem is, I'm not sure. 
If it's not grub, feel free to tell me so and I will look elsewhere for help.

This is the sequence I use to install grub on the file image that will be 
transferred to the flash.

/sbin/grub --verbose --no-floppy --batch <<EOF >/dev/null 2>&1
device (hd0) $DEST_FILE
geometry (hd0) $cyl $heads $sectors
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
install $grub_PARMS (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 
0x8000 p /boot/grub/g
rub.conf
quit
EOF


any ideas?
--
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