Linux fails to see my kernel upon reboot

[SirCave]

I have two 160 GB western digital drives. One is IDE and the other is SATA. The Mother board is a MSI K8N Neo Platinum, socket 754. I am not using a Raid configuration. The IDE drive is connected to a controller card in a pci slot. (I have it connected this way I think because I did not want my DVD RW/player on the same channel with my Yamaha RW when I do cdrom copies. I also thought I read or heard somewhere that my MB would not recognize my 160 drive without the controller card, but I am not sure of that now.) Now I am booting a minimal installation of win2k on the IDE drive for my games only and trying to run Gentoo on my SATA drive, which is setup as a secondary drive. When I boot, my bios is set to see the IDE drive first, then the SATA drive. The gentoo documentation states that my sda1 is being seen as hd1. I am using grub as my bootloader eventho I would rather use lilo but the documentation I am following does not state how to configure lilo for an amd64 2005.0 networkless installation. When I reboot, I get grub error 15 file not found errors. Even when I know that my /boot/grub/grub.conf file points to the right drive in gentoo speak, e.g. (hd0,0) for mbr and windows, (hd1,0) for boot, (hd1,1) for swap, (hd1,2) for root.

Now, I am thinking that Gentoo can not see this configuration because of the bios settings and therefore can not dual boot my system. Sure, Win2K comes up everytime, but when I use the option to start Gentoo, I get those nagging "can't find image on partition blah blah blah. Well, I've checked the partition and the image exists so I am thinking that the way gentoo boots does not actually see my SATA drive. I am completely confused. Have I confused anyone else as well? Any suggestions? I wanted to post this on Gentoo's site, but I thought my boys over here should get first crack at this one cause I love them so much. Having said all of that, does anyone have any ideas, suggestions, help, comments?

[DaveQB]

Well this is a tough one.

All i can suggest is that we need to log the boot up procedure.

Does hitting ALT+CTRL+F1 give you the dmesg ?? It does on a boot halt further into it, i wonder fi it does at such an early stage.

Try and see, it may well show you were its looking for the kernel exactly....

[SirCave]

I will try that and get back to you. I am posting from work, so it may be some time since I have five more hours to go. Thank you always for such a quick response.