System hangs on config file

[Richard Harvey Chapman]

I have a system booting off of a compact flash card (acting as a hard
drive). Grub hangs while loading the config file. Specifically, it hangs
after printing "GRUB loading, please wait...".

System is a 1 GHz pentium M machine
(http://www.ampro.com/html/EPIC_FormFactor_ReadyBoard_800.html).
The CF card is 1 GB. I'm not sure if it matters, but I have  several CF
cards that appear identical. Some boot fine and some do not. The only
discernable difference is that the ones that boot have "3.3V" on them
while the ones that do not boot are labeled "3.3/5V". But again, the
dual-voltage cards seem to work just fine once I have booted them (via
grub on a CD).

Sometimes the system resets itself after 5 minutes or so. I have noticed
later that sometimes the system has booted itself (but I'm not sure how
since it takes anywhere from 20 min to many hours and I haven't been
able to sit and watch it do nothing).

I have booted the machine using a USB cd-rom with grub using the same
commands in the grub.conf file. It boots fine, then. However, the system
hangs if I try this: "configfile (hd0,1)/boot/grub/grub.conf".

My configfile:

default 0
timeout 5
title TimeSys Linux (ReadyBoard 800)
    root (hd0,1)
    kernel /boot/bzImage-2.4.18-timesys-4.1.411 ro ip= vga=0x305
root=/dev/hdd2 hda=noprobe

I've even checked the config file with a hex editor to make sure there's
no corruption or strange characters in it. I changed all tabs to spaces.
Is there a way to debug what grub is doing so I can provide more
information and/or figure out where it is hanging?

Thank you,

R.

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature