This is strange. Do you remember the exact commands you had to give
Grub to get it to boot on the 9400? Because it sounds like the USB
drive is not being mapped as hd0 when booting from the USB drive on
that machine. That would be a strange BIOS problem...
Well, I wrote down in paper some of the differences with the John's document
and the relevant part was:
grub> cat (hd0,2)/boot/grub/tester
(and it worked)
grub> kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8
grub> initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd_usb.gz
grub> boot
(and booted ok)
and the current grub configuration, which seems to work (allways) on the D620 is
timeout=10
title Fedora8initial
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8
initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd_usb.gz
title Fedora8-2.6.23.9-85.fc8
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-2.63.9-85.fc8
initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd-2.6.23.9-85.img
The partions in the usb disk are:
sda1 - NTFS
sda2 - swap
sda3 - Linux
Regards,
Miguel.