I have been using SuSE for awhile, and still love it, but finally thought I have progressed to the point I may successfully be able to do a gentoo install to test out the distro that never would install in all my trials having been such a noob. I have seen many posts about gentoo and installing it, even many other grub problems. But I got a brand new one. I followed the gentoo handbook for an x86_64 install, and all has gone flawlessly thus far, up until it took me about an hour to configure grub just to get grub-install to work.(I had been getting /boot/grub/stage1 cannot be read.) Thrilled, I rebooted only to be greeted by the grub CLI. CRAP!

Info: I have 3 HDs:

/dev/sda with sda2(XFS holding / and /boot, etc) and sda1(swap)
/dev/sdb(reiserfs 3.6 data)
/dev/hda(reiserfs 3.6 data)

The grub.conf finally ended up looking roughly like this before I finally got the "grub-install /dev/sda" command to successfully take.

So... I figure the pretty obvious point here is though grub obviously installed finally, I have paths or some other such issue in my grub.conf. Can anyone help me out with that?

Edit: I forgot to mention, now that I am in the grub CLI, not unix or a linux CLI... I am a bit lost in commands and don't know exactly how to change anything.

I think you have some syntax errors. Here is my menu.lst entry for Ubuntu:

<<start>>
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-10-386
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/hdg1 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-10-386
savedefault
boot
<<end>>
I have Ubuntu on the 3rd hd, with no separate /boot partition. Note the root entry format is way different from what you posted. GRUB sysntax for drives is h0, hd1, etc. (hd2,0) is the 1st partition on the 3rd drive.

Also in mine is the word "boot", which I'm guessing is also significant.

Okay, the reason I was using that kind of info (/dev/sda instead of hd0, hd1, etc) was because I didn't understand what it was doing. I had hd0 as the first drive, which is good, but didn't get the 0 after the comma which caused it to try boot the swap, which did nothing. I now understand the (hd0,1) to be what I need. so.... now what? I can't seem to figure out get back in via the livdcd to /dev/sda2. I have no clue why but the device is always "busy".

How do I get back to my /dev/sda2 in the livecd to make the changes to my grub.conf?

Okay... I tried using the grub console to set the devices, which worked, but apparently typoed my kernel name. I now recieve a grub boot error 17. So it doesn't load grub console anymore, and I still can't figure out how to get in to edit my grub.conf off the livecd.

Anyone got any help there?