greetings,

I use lilo and Extlinux as my loaders, but recently decided to give grub a chance.

The first thing I am having troubles is this:

When I have my usb connected I have to tell grub to root to (hd1,0)
but if my usb is not plugged then I have to specify root to (hd0,0)...
which is very annoying, since I sometimes boot from my usb and other times directly from my hdd.

In lilo and extlinux i just have to specify /dev/sda# and thats it... no confusion.

I kind of like grub but is there anyway to configure grub with global device names instead of hd#?

this is my current menu.lst

Well try to use UUID of the drives since the UUID only change when you delete and recreate the drives or the partitions
To list the UUId use the command ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

or maybe the LABEL name of the usb partition
(that you can set when you format, or afterwards with
the tune2fs command (it's the -L option: tune2fs ... -L volume_name)
check the grub docs/tutorials to see if it accepts it

#blkid
command will also help to get uuid
thanks

thanks guys, I am going to try tonight, do I have to do it this way: