Grub across SATA drives? (long)

[Alan Lord]

Hi all,

I have a rather confusing issue trying to get grub to boot... Sorry this 
is so long.....

Here's the background information:

AMD64 PC with a recent ASUS A8n-SLI mobo (NVIDIA NForce4 SLI chipset 
with built-in SATA2 controller).
1st Hard Disk is a SATA2 drive with Windows XP on the first partition 
and lots of other partitons.
2nd Hard Disk is a SATA drive with lots of partitions.
There are two CD/DVD drives on the IDE.

The BIOS on this mobo can offer me a boot menu to choose which Hard Disk 
or CD I would like to boot from.

I have built a new Linux system from LFS (www.linuxfromscratch.org) and 
this resides in sda11. Grub version is 0.97, GCC is 4.02. (I have built 
many LFS systems before and used grub frequently so I am not completely 
naive :-))

I have had problems in the past overwriting the MBR and not being able 
to boot Windows so I am trying to install GRUB into the MBR of the 
second drive and boot linux which on the first drive.

When I run a LiveCD and chroot into my linux system (sda11) and run grub 
I do the following:

grub> root (hd0,10)
grub> setup (hd1)

All seems to be fine from the reports back about stage1, 1.5 files being 
written to the MBR etc... No errors are reported.

My grub menu.lst is this:

# Begin /boot/grub/menu.lst
# By default boot the first menu entry.
default 0

# Allow 30 seconds before booting the default.
timeout 30

# Use prettier colours.
color green/black light-green/black

# The first entry is for Windows.
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot

title LFS-6.2svn
root (hd0,10)
kernel /boot/lfskernel-2.6.12.5 root=/dev/sda11 vga=791

# End /boot/grub/menu.lst

When I tell the bios' boot menu to boot from the second hard drive I get 
screens of GRUB GRUB GRUB... scrolling by.

I have googled extensively and read that this error can be caused by the 
BIOS auto detecting the hard disk but I do not have any options to 
change this in the bios.
I have also read that GRUB might think that it is hd0 when it boots 
(remember it is installed on the MBR of sdb) rather than hd1 so I have 
tried changing the hd0 entries in menu.lst to hd1 to see if that works 
but it didn't seem to make any difference...

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Alan