debian-sarge grub install

["Takis Diakoumis" <takisd@alphalink.com.au>]

Hi 

i'm having quite the problem with grub and booting into my system. 

i am installing debian-sarge (27032004 release) and can't seem to get
beyond the first reboot. 

when i do reboot all i get is GRUB GRUB GRUB... all over the screen
repeating infinitely so it appears to be a problem with the boot loader and
its installation in the MBR (?).

the HD setup is as follows: 
hda - 120GB drive (/) 
hdb - 20GB drive (/backup) 
hdc - 80GB drive (/home) 

i have tried different combinations including separate /boot partitions -
all to no avail. 

grub is installed on hda. 

previously i had redhat9, mandrake9.2 and suse9 on this machine
(individually - not mutli-boot). all of these worked fine (i've been
weaning myself onto debian). only now when i installed debian is it causing
problems. 

i also installed the same debian distro on another machine and didn't have
problems - so it must be the combination of this machine and debian-sarge. 

i have checked the bios and it is booting into the correct drive. 

i remembered a suse install bootdisk i created had a boot from hd option so
i used this selecting boot from hd and only then did i get the grub menu
-sequence was: boot disk -> select boot from hd -> grub menu. 

ok, so now at a command prompt. i reinstalled grub on the mbr using: 
grub> root (hd0,0) 
grub> setup (hd0) 

the above said it was successful. but it still didn't boot and came up with
the same GRUB all over the screen. 
i then cleared the MBR completely scrubbing it with zeros and then
reinstalling grub on the machine and the MBR. still no go. 

i searched the web for similar issues and found a few. most seemed to be
related to bios LBA settings. the bios was set to autodetect the drives and
always defaulted to LBA anyway. i did force LBA on it through the bios  -
this didn't help either.

i also tried installing grub with setup --force-lba (hd0) but this too
didn't work.

i'm stumped!! it worked fine for other distros - now its stuffed and all i
get is GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB all over my screen over and over. 

i have checked /boot/grub contents and all images/files are there and look
ok. 

if anyone has any ideas i would really appreciate it. i'm getting desparate
here. i'm determined to have a debian box up and running!!

any suggestions at all.... 

thanks heaps... 

Takis