[olug] grub boot from SCSI?

[Ryan O'Rourke]

I've been trying to get a RH9 server up for a few days now, but Grub
keeps fighting me. Please bear with me, this may get a bit convoluted...

The server consists of 4 SCSI and 4 IDE drives. The SCSI drives are
/dev/sda, sdb, sdc, sdd and are not RAID. I believe they all live on the
same PCI SCSI controller. 
The IDE drives live on two separate Promise Ultra 100 cards and are
/dev/hde, hdg, hdi, hdk and are set up as two separate RAID 0 software
arrays.
My /boot partition resides on /dev/sda1 in the MBR but for some reason I
can't get GRUB to boot the machine without the bootdisk created during
install. And even then, it's not booting the SMP kernel.
I've tried to create a graphical GRUB bootdisk according to the
instructions found in the GRUB manual[1] so I can have the standard GRUB
menu and select the SMP kernel at boot time - but there are a couple
problems with this approach.
First, the GRUB graphical menu is all garbled up and messy. Barely
readable at all. And second, even when I do select a kernel to boot from
the list it gives me an error message: "Selected disk does not exist"

I suppose I should make note that this server used to be RH8.0 and all 8
drives were RAID in some form or another. At that point, I had a
graphical GRUB bootdisk that worked to boot the SMP kernel even though
the /boot partition resided on a RAID device. I didn't like that setup
for a "about-to-go-production" machine so I trashed it and started over.
I see in hindsight that was a big mistake.

I've also tried the following approach to making a GRUB bootdisk, but it
needs kernel options passed to it in order to work and I'm not
comfortable enough with the syntax for that to be feasible.
# cd /usr/share/grub/i386-pc
# dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
# dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1

So, I guess what I'm asking is.... has anyone been able to make GRUB
work in a situation like this? I'm sure this isn't an extraordinary
situation.... what am I doing wrong?

Thanks for saving my sanity.
-- Ryan

[1]GRUB manual:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/grub-0.92/html_node/Installing-GRUB-using-grub-install.html#Installing%20GRUB%20using%20grub-install