I'm curious if anyone has a fix, workaround, or advice for the "grub loading stage1.5" hanging error. This occurs sometimes on fresh grub-installs, where grub never loads, and instead hangs on this text with no error message:
I have read all I can find out there on this error, and many people suggest it has to do with an issue in the BIOS. All I can say is that I have experienced this error on both new and old machines, and in my case changing BIOS settings (like order of boot drives, etc...) seem to have no effect. Right now I have one machine where the problem sometimes occurs and doesn't occur on the exact same setup and hard drive layout.
A little more about my test setup:
I have a Windows partition on hda1 and an extended partition (hda2) that contains hda5 which is Linux. Here is the fdisk output:
Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77545 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 56731 28592321 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 56731 77536 10485760 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/hda5 56731 77536 10485728+ 83 Linux
This fdisk layout had been identical in all my tests, and as I mentioned above, sometimes it works, sometimes I get the hang.
I have done some debugging of the grub source to find out where the freeze happens. I traced it to this line:
file: stage2/disk_io.c
fuction: int grub_open (char *filename)
line: if (!errnum && (*(fsys_table[fsys_type].dir_func)) (filename))
In particular it hangs at this part of the if statement: (*(fsys_table[fsys_type].dir_func)) (filename)
I'm not exactly sure why it can't load the function pointer, or why it waits infinitely. Does anyone know what this line is trying to do specifically, or why it may be hanging? I don't know the grub source well enough to really get any deeper.