Hi all,

I recently installed gentoo on my new external hd, and in the process i decided to install GRUB onto the external hd as well. (NOT onto the MBR of my old hard drive)

When i was partitioning the HD using the installation cd environment, it recognized my external HD as /dev/sda however, i discovered that in
grub.conf, when i specify

root (sd0,0)

and i boot from the external HD it does not recognize itself as /dev/sda...i found out that when i boot from the external HD it thinks itself as /dev/hda. so in grub.conf i changed the root to (hd0,0) because /dev/sda1 is where my linux boot partition is.

it then entered into the boot process correctly, but...

PROBLEM: when the boot process gets to the part when it has to mount the root, it tells me that my root= clause in grub.conf is wrong...i have the root on /dev/sda3, so i set root=/dev/hda3 thinking that it will recognize it correspondingly since it thought that /dev/sda1 was /dev/hda1...what am i doing wrong?

I'm surprised an external came up as hd0.
The "root (hd0,0)" is a directive for grub- it doesn't know (or care) about S-ATA or (E)IDE - it cares about disks; hd0,hd1, ...
The "root=..." is for the kernel - and it does care.
Try changing it to "root=/dev/sda3", as you would expect the kernel to know it as.