long story short: I had XP. Tried RH9 on spare hd. Decided to forever use it. Formatted [former] XP hd and installed RH9 on it. Now have both hd's hooked up so I can boot into the test RH9 to look at all my happy custom configurations.

Heres the problem: I can't boot into my test RH9 hd (set as slave).

If I disconnect my new RH9 hd, and set the test RH9 back to master, it boots just fine. The new RH9 boots fine alone and with the test RH9 hd... I just cant boot into my test RH9 thru grub.

This is the error I get: "Error 23: Error while parsing number"

according to my new RH9 the second hd is dev/hdb and this is its entry in my grub.conf file:

title Red Hat 1st Install
rootnoverify (hdb,0)
chainloader +1

I've played around with the hdb,0 parameter to no success. Whatever the problem is its not linux... so it would be awesome if someone could tell me what im doing wrong. Thanks!

Should be (hd1). Grub uses a different naming convention. The ',0' is not needed because you are chainloading from a disk, not a partition.

When i replace hdb,0 with hd1 I end up going right back into the same boot menu on my primay hd. I tried (hd1,0) and (hd1,1) and that doesnt work. Keep in mind the test install of RH9 is still intact and fully functioning (when as a single drive). I also didn't do anything abnormal with partitioning (standard /boot, /, /swap) for both drives.

I should probably mention that when I first tried (hd1) there were no other parameters added by me. My reply made it look like i ignored some info in aaa's post.

Mount your test Red Hat's '/' partition in your primary one.

'mount /dev/hdbx /mnt/hd -t auto'

'x' is partition number, /mnt/hd is the mount point, make sure the /mnt/hd folder exists, if '-t auto' doesn't work, replace it with the filesystem type your test Red Hat was (ex: '-t ext2').
Then check your /etc/grub.conf for the test Rh. It should be in /mnt/hd/etc/grub.conf . Take a look at it with your favorite editor (pico, kedit, etc..), and copy/paste the entries you want to your primary Rh's grub.conf, which is /etc/grub.conf . You will have to edit them slightly, because the test Rh thinks it's on Master. In the entries you copy/paste from your test to your new, change al references to 'hd0' to 'hd1'. For example, if you saw a line in your test grub.conf that said 'root (hd0,0)', you'd change it to 'root (hd1,0). Keep the numbers after the commas as is. You'll also have to edit the test Rh's /etc/fstab file (from your new Rh it would be /mnt/hd/etc/fstab) to reflect the fact that the test Rh will be on a slave hard drve.