GRUB problems with eSATA hard drive.

[sgarman]

I've fixed my share of GRUB problems, but this one's got me stumped.

I just added an eSATA external hard drive to my system (it's a Western Digital My Book) along with an Addonics PCI eSATA card.

Here was my initial setup:

BIOS boots to my single PATA drive (hda), which has GRUB installed on its boot sector. My GRUB config then points to an internal SATA drive that has a separate /boot partition (sda1). I have two internal SATA drives. This works with the following GRUB config section:

title           Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-16-386
root            (hd1,0)
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-386 root=/dev/md0 ro quiet splash
initrd          /initrd.img-2.6.20-16-386
quiet
savedefault

Now enter the eSATA drive. If I leave the drive turned off while my system boots, and then turn the drive on, it is detected as /dev/sdd. However, if I turn the drive on before my system boots, I get the following:

GRUB loading stage1.5
GRUB loading, please wait...
(long pause of nearly a minute)
Error 15

What's frustrating about this is I can't even get into the GRUB shell to test anything. So I've tried changing the root section to address different drive numbers (hd0, hd2, etc), assuming that the introduction of the eSATA drive to be messing up my drive order, but still no luck.

Can anyone give me any tips to figure this out?

Thanks,

Scott