Boot embedded PC from a USB hard disk using grub

This is the procedure I used to install grub 0.97 on a USB disk using a desktop PC running RHEL:

The disk device is: /dev/sdb
I created a primary partition called: /dev/sdb1
This partition was marked as boot.

1. mke2fs /dev/sdb1
2. mount -t ext2 /dev/sdb1 /mnt
3. /sbin/grub/grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdb1
4. umount /mnt

Then I got:
Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /mnt/boot/grub/device.map
Check is this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect, fix it and re-run the script 'grub-install'

(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/sda
(hd1) /dev/sdb

Then I connected the disk to my embedded target (x86 pc).
On the bios I chose to boot from the USB disk.
I got a blinked cursor. Nothing else.

What am I doing wrong ? Should I fix device.map ?
My embedded PC has only one compact flash disk (probably hd0).

Thanks.

maybe you can use unetbootln or syslinux...

The device in grub-install should be /dev/sdb (were the mbr is written)and not /dev/sdb1.

You forgot, or didn't know, to add

"/dev/sdb" to end of grub-install

/sbin/grub/grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb

see if that works?

also, are you sure there is a menu.lst in there?