[CentOS] GRUB woes: GRUB Hard Disk Error

Sun Sep 19 18:29:18 UTC 2010
Rob Del Vecchio <rob.delvecchio at gmail.com>

Hello all,
I am attempting to install CentOS 5.5 on a recently donated home server (was
Windows).  I've tried installing twice; first, separating /boot, swap, /,
/var, /usr and /home into different partitions, the second time choosing
default layout.  Both times have resulted in "GRUB Hard Disk Error" upon
boot.

About the hard disk, it is a Seagate SATA drive.  I do not have another
drive to configure RAID.
The BIOS is set to:
Onboard PATA/SATA Adapters = Both
SATA mode = IDE
Onboard PATA/SATA Cofiguration = Enhanced Mode (???)

Upon booting into rescue mode, the file systems mount successfully and I am
able to read data from files.
The current file structure is (default layout):
/boot
/
swap

grub.conf:
#boot=/dev/sda1
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-194.el5)
       root (hd1,0)
       kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
       initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.el5.img
title Other
       rootmoverify (hd0,0)
       chainloader +1

This is brand new from the installation.

My questions are, what am I missing?  Bad configuration?  Should
boot=/dev/sda1 really be commented out?

Some pointers for manually installing and configuring grub would be great,
as I am lacking experience in that area.

Any idea as to what is going on would be great!

Thanks in advance,
Rob
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