Grub error: Destination address too large

[Konrad Mohrfeldt]

Hello,

i have mainboard with an onboard Via C3 Samuel 2 @ 800Mhz and want to 
use it as a little home server. The system has 512MB of RAM and a PCI 
modem. I can post the exact specs later if necessary (address@hidden atm). My 
OS of choice is Debian 5 and I'm installing it from a netinst CD. The 
installation target is a 4GB Panasonic Class 2 SD Card connected via a 
one of those Hong-Kong-Ebay-IDE2SD-Converters :).

I first tried to install Gentoo but this fails when I try to chroot 
(segmentation fault). This also happened to me when I booted from an 
Crunchbang Linux Live CD.

Then i downloaded the netinst iso and tried to install Debian. Using 
this guide 
(http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/InstallOnSDcardOrUsbStick) I 
selected manual partitioning, created a 4GB ext2 Partition (ext3 has 
journaling - probably not the best for an SD Card) with mount option 
noatime and boot flag. No swap partition.

When installation of the base system finished i selected nothing from 
tasksel (not even standard system - maybe thats the problem?).

Finally:

I did the installation process two times because I tried to install grub 
on /dev/hda and /dev/hda1. But every time I get an error message saying 
that grub install failed. Reselecting the grub install task from the 
debian installer menu didn't help (actually the installer seems to 
refuse to do anything on the sd card after trying to install grub the 
first (and failed) time in the installation process). Well, not giving 
up hope of a nice debian system i downloaded a "SuperGrubDisk" iso and 
started grub. I first tried to use the default boot option resulting in 
the subjects error message. I then tried to type in the necessary 
information on my own.

root (hd0,1) - success
linux /boot/vmlinuz... ro single root=/dev/hda1 - success, i also tried 
uuid for root parameter
initrd /boot/initrd... - success
boot - failed: error: Destination address too large.

That's the point I'm stuck now.

If you need any additional system informationen i'll try to get it when 
I'm @ home again.

Any help is much _much_ appreciated!

Thanks

Konrad

PS: Just for the sake of completeness: The Via C3 Samuel 2 only supports 
i486 if you define i686 as i686 + cmov. The CPU does not support cmov 
instruction.