CentOS - May 2007 - CentOS 4 won't boot on test machine

I must have really shot myself in the foot on this one.

I reinstalled CentOS 4.4 (have to, for now) on my test machine,
exactly the way it was before (same options anyway), but when it comes
up, I get:

  Booting 'CentOS-4 x86_64 (2.6.9-42.ELsmp)'

root(hd1,0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-42.ELsmp ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet

Error 15: File not found

Press any key to continue...

If I press any key, I get a garbled screen that is nearly impossible
to read.  So, I rebooted from the DVD in rescue mode, ran fdisk to
verify that the partitions are set up correctly, ran e2fsck on all
three formatted partitions (sde1 - /boot, sde3 - /, sde6 - /home), ran
e2label to make sure the labels are set correctly and everything
checks out.  All the file images are present in /boot where they
should be, and the device map shows hd1 is /dev/sde3.

Is my disk rotten or something?  Everything is in the right place (so
far) but it won't boot.

The test machine is of a type I don't recognize, it's running a
2.88GHz Xeon processor with 8Gb of memory, a 4-disk RAID SATA
controller (currently configured as 4 separate drives, one of which is
"spared" because it did go bad) and a WD hard drive as /dev/sde.  It
has a 17" FP monitor with an ATI <something> XL video card, though I
doubt that last part is terribly relevant.

Suggestions welcome.

-- 
Mark Hull-Richter
DATAllegro (www.datallegro.com)
85 Enterprise, Second Floor, Aliso Viejo, CA  92656
949-680-3082 - Office     949-680-3001 - fax

On May 23, 2007, at 2:08 PM, Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
> the device map shows hd1 is /dev/sde3.
Hmm, this is the most suspicious part of your message. First of all,  
hd1 can't be /dev/sde3 - it would have to be /dev/sde. Thus (hd1,0)  
is /dev/sde1. Second, the device map is used by the grub installer,  
but not by grub itself. It uses the actual BIOS boot order - hd0 is  
the first hard disk, hd1 is the *SECOND* hard disk. So if you boot  
grub with this configuration, it will try to load an operating system  
from a different hard drive!

-- 
Scott Lamb <http://www.slamb.org/>