Problem booting via GRUB-hangs with 'GRUB<one space>'-only reset possible

[Roger Weihrauch]

Howdie Colleagues.

I would appreciate some help/hints on the following matter:

(Abstract)

GRUB shows only 'GRUB<one space>' on command line and hangs completely;
only reset will help and to boot from CD with loading necessary modules 
before
to get Linux SuSE 9.0 running.


HARDWARE:

My MB is of 'VIA-4x266' chipset for P4 CPU,
Adaptac 2940 U/UW SCSI controller
(2 SCSI disks attached to this SCSI controller),
Promise IDE 20265 on-board RAID controller
(4 IDE disks attached:
'hda' and 'hdc' for RAID-Stripe0, 'hdb' / 'hdd' for single RAID-Stripe1)
Onboard IDE controller:
(Primary attached to two IDE disks for SW-RAID mirroring,
Secondary attached to:
master (IDE-Burner)
slave (IDE DVD-ROM drive)),


BIOS gives three possibilities to have booting order defined:

'Boot order for RAID/SCSI':     <SCSI/RAID>

'1st':          set to  <CD-ROM>
'2nd':          set to  <Floppy>
'3rd':          set to  <SCSI>

and addtionally:

'Boot other device':    set to  <Disabled>

And on bottom of this page:     <RAID boot Rom is enabled>

So, for Linux OS the partitioning is as follows:

/dev/hde5       /dev/md0 (OxFD)
/dev/hdf5       /dev/md0 for softraid
/dev/sda1       /boot (including /grub, ~31MB)
/dev/sda5       swap
/dev/sda6       /opt
/dev/sda7       /usr
/dev/sdb5       swap
/dev/sdb6       / (root directory)

/dev/ataraid/d0p0       /media/stripe0
/dev/ataraid/d1p0       /media/stripe1
/dev/ataraid/d2p0       /media/stripe2
/dev/md0        /media/mirror0 (softraid)

NOTE:
RAID controller disks are recognized from BIOS as follows:

/dev/hda                is 1st disk
/dev/hdb                is 2nd disk
/dev/hdc                is 3rd disk
/dev/hdd                is 4th disk for Promise-RAID controller.

So, BIOS scans first RAID disks before getting the SCSI disks.

This scan leads to the following device map:

/dev/fd0                (fd0)
/dev/hde                (hd0)
/dev/hdf                (hd1)
/dev/ataraid/d0 (hd2)
/dev/atatraid/d1        (hd3)
/dev/ataraid/d2 (hd4)
/dev/sda                (hd5)
/dev/sdb                (hd6)

Question:
Why are onboard IDE controller disks hde/hdf entered BEFORE RAID disks?
As the RAID disks are scanned and identified starting from hda?
Could you please explain?

So, as assumption out of the device-map the
/boot directory is to be found from GRUB view on (hd5,0), and
/(root directory) is to be found from GRUB view on (hd6,5), isn't it?

Also the 'root directory for GRUB mechanism' is to be found on (hd5);
I mean GRUB has to be installed with '-d (hd5)' option, right?

This is also what YAST shows me on config files for GRUB.

But this does not work, so I changed, due to have found stage2 for GRUB
on (hd2), my SCSI disks to (hd[2,3]) to have RIAD disks as (hd[4-6]).

Also YAST showed me the proper changes in GRUB config files for this.
To take over these changes YAST re-installed GRUB with described changes.

This step showed no errors in YAST!

So, this re-configuration did not change GRUB's behaviour mentioned above.

Additionally I re-viewed to have the /boot partition marked as 
'active/bootable'.


So, in general:

What did I do wrong in configuration?
Which steps will help here?
I am definetly stuck at this point.


Thank you all very much for your help/support/hints on this.


Kind regards from Germany,
Roger.


PS: I am a real newbie on Linux/GRUB.
I also tried to understand the GRUB info pages,
but I do not understand how GRUB/its bootmechanism really works.

Where can I find a real 'DUMMY' manual for this?