Grub boot loader not working to boot off removable drive

[Jennifer M. Morse]

I have a second hard drive caddy which plugs into the removable media 
bay of my Dell Inspiron 8100 notebook. This is the same bay as my floppy 
drive, so, I have to remove the floppy to access the second, 10 gig, 
drive. My primary drive is a 40 gig drive that holds Win2k. It has two 
partitions, the boot C: drive is NTFS. The E: drive is Fat32, and used 
to store all my document files.

I updated the BIOS of my notebook to put the boot order as follows:

CD/DVD drive
Removable media hard drive
floppy drive
primary hard drive

I installed Redhat Linux 7.3 right "out of the box" with Grub as the 
boot loader. It was the basic "notebook" install in the Redhat install 
screen.  I have the Personal edition that I ordered directly from 
Redhat. I installed it onto the removable drive. Because I don't want to 
write to the MBR of the primary drive, I configured the installer to 
create a /boot area on the beginning of the 10 gig drive. That way, when 
I remove the drive, the machine will boot to Windows, and when the drive 
is installed, it will boot to Linux (because it's earlier in the boot 
order than the C drive).

When I boot with the 10 gig drive in the bay, it starts to go through 
the boot process and then stops with this error:

root(hd1,0)
File System Type unknown, partition type 0xde
Kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-3 ro root=/dev/hdc2 hdb=ide-scsi
error 17 cannot mount selected partition

It doesn't technically "freeze", because I can still type on the keys 
and get responses. But, it alternates between the opening Grub splash 
screen, and the above message. The boot process is certainly halted from 
proceeding any further.

That said, I've been asking around and as far as I can tell, it's likely 
to be a problem with Grub trying to load the C drive intead of the 
removable drive. Each drive is configured properly in fstab (the primary 
drive is hda and hdb, the removable drive is hdc).

I'm able to manuever around in redhat rescue quite well. I can mount the 
installed drive and it's all there. It only won't work wiith Grub. I 
also haven't  gotten "find" to work although that may not be related.

This is all the information I know how to provide. If you need more 
(especially specific documents), let me know so I can copy them out to 
text files.

--
Jennifer M. Morse (address@hidden)
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Physics Department -- Building 510 M -- ext 7710