Failure to boot into second stage

[Greg Till]

I'm stumped. I finished the first stage install and rebooted, but the 
reboot hangs right before I would expect GRUB to kick in (or something 
to happen... anything). I just get a flashing cursor.

I installed to hde, a new 80GB Maxtor on the primary ATA controller (CMD 
648) on my ASUS CUBX (old 440BX board). The BIOS is set to boot off of 
this controller. I've had this setup work before using Fedora, so I 
don't know what's the matter here other than a bad disk, which seems 
unlikely given that it formatted correctly and allowed the files to be 
written to it in stage one.

The only other possibility that occurs to me is that the 80GB drive is 
simply too large for the CUBX. But I haven't seen anything to support 
that conclusion, either.

Suggestions?