tray open or drive not ready

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

I've been trying to install grub on my hard drive (which is /dev/hdc in 
Linux-land), and not having any success.

I've booted into the Hurd, and run "grub-install", but that just gives 
me a usage summary.

So I've tried "grub-install /dev/hdc", which reports that /dev/hdc is 
not found or not a block device.

So I've tried "grub-install /dev/hd0 which complains about hd0 having a 
tray open or drive not ready, and that /dev/hd0 does not have any 
corresponding BIOS drive.

So I cd'd into /dev, and ran "./MAKEDEV hd0", which does not generate 
any errors, but then when I do a "ls -l hd*" I get:

   hd0 : tray open or drive not ready
   hd0 : tray open or drive not ready
   hd0 : tray open or drive not ready
   hd0 : tray open or drive not ready
   brw-r-----   1   root   root   0, 0 Jun 17 08:07 hd0
   brw-r-----   1   root   root   0, 0 Jun 17 08:07 hd1
   brw-r-----   1   root   root   0, 0 Jun 17 08:06 hd2
   brw-r-----   1   root   root   0, 0 May 29 09:07 hd2s1
   brw-r-----   1   root   root   0, 0 Jun 18 06:50 hd2s3
   brw-r-----   1   root   root   0, 0 Jun 17 08:08 hd3


Can anyone shed any light on why I'm getting these "tray open..." 
messages, or why grub doesn't seem to want to install? I've also tried 
installing grub from the grub boot floppy by typing, at the grub> prompt:
   root (hd0,0)
   setup (hd)
which generates four or five lines of output, and it _looks_ to me like 
it installed properly, but when I try to boot off the hard drive, it 
just hangs before ever getting to a "Loading stage1" or similar message, 
usually forcing me to cycle the power to reset the computer.

Just for kicks, I booted off a MS-DOS 6.22 floppy and ran "fdisk /mbr", 
and then tried to install grub again from the grub floppy, but the same 
thing happened.

Thanks!

--
Kent