I've always been pampered by RedHat because it took care of grub. Now I'm having issues.

This is basically what I did:

I emerged grub and ran the grub command. I then did:

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

I then edited /boot/grub/grub.conf so it looked like this:

default 0
timeout 20
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/kernel-2.4.20-gentoo-r9 root=/dev/hda3
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd-2.4.20-gentoo-r9

When I reboot the machine it goes past Grub stage 1.5 and haults saying:

Grub
Error 2

It doesn't give any error messages other then Error 2. I did a google search for what exactly Error 2 means and their seems to be a lot of different things it could be.

The boot partition is on /dev/hda1 by the way.

Any idea what the problem is here?

Hmmm, I do see something strange. Your root is /dev/hda3 and your boot is /dev/hda1. That's fine, I have an similer setup. But Shoulden't grub.conf look like :

cos "/boot/<bla>" could be the path once you have actually booted and mounted the boot partition. If you suply /dev/hda1 as root to grub, you should leave "/boot" out.

No that doesn't work either.

Leave out the splash images entery and see what happens.