Grub stage2 fails on old 386

[Frode Vatvedt Fjeld]

Dear GRUB maintainers,

I've got a rather ancient 386 PC that I wish to run GRUB on, from a
floppy. There is no harddisk on the PC (although an IDE controller is
integrated with the floppy controller, so I can't remove that). I
create a boot floppy by dumping the files stage1 and stage2 onto a
floppy (as described in the documentation), and this floppy works fine
with most machines other than this old one. On the old 386 however,
stage2 of recent grub versions fails miserably, apparently when it
tries to start up. I do get the "GRUB Loading stage2....." message, so
apparently stage1 works ok. But (apparently) when stage2 is finished
loading and starting up, the machine simply reboots. No output from
stage2 is discernible. stage1 and stage2 are built from a fresh
distribution archive, with ./configure && gmake, on FreeBSD
4.5-RELEASE.

% gcc -v
Using builtin specs.
gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release) [FreeBSD]

% as --version
GNU assembler 2.11.2 20010719 [FreeBSD]
Copyright 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.
This assembler was configured for a target of `i386-unknown-freebsd4'.



This behavior is observed with GRUB versions 0.91, 0.92, and what's
currently in CVS. However, version 0.90 works fine, and gives me the
GRUB prompt. So presumably something broke between releases 0.90 and
0.91.

Please let me know if I have left out any required details.

Best regards,
-- 
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld