...

running find /grub/grub.conf from the grub shell when the machine tries to boot returns (hd0,0) and /dev/sdi1 is where /boot mounts.

That's *very* odd. You don't have an HBA or something else - flash key? anything? What's on this system that it sees stuff that high?

Directly related: look at your BIOS, and see what drives it sees, and what's bootable, in what order. Perhaps you can move up the boot drive?

<snip>

So I went back to this tonight and fought, fought and fought some more. there was no HBA sort of thing, just a little home machine, the BIOS could see all the drives and were all in the order I expected, but I never got anywhere with trying to write to the MBRs of any of the drives. I could go into recovery mode and get the installed system to come up that way, utilities like grub-install seemed to hang in attempting to write to the devices. I ended up just bailing, took a USB key installed it (it showed up as /dev/sda) and installed grub to the MBR there so now I can boot.

Thanks for the suggestions.