Boot grub on floppy vs on MBR

[brownh@hartford-hwp.com (Haines Brown)]

I'm running debian sarge and trying to make a grub boot floppy for a
new cross-installation of sarge from my old disk (sda, sarge,
kernel 2.4.18-bf2.4) to a new scsi disk added to the scsi bus (sdc,
sarge, kernel 2.6.7-1). The sdc1 root partition is flagged as
boot. I'm using reiserfs on both hard disks, but not the floppy.

At this point, I created a grub boot floppy in preparation for
installing grub on sdc. That floppy boots sda OK, but only leads to a
kernel panic when I try to boot sdc, even though the floppy stanza 
is the same as the stanza used to boot sdc from the grub bootloader
the MBR of sda (except it's hd0 for sda1):

    kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sdc1
    root (hd2,0)

Kernel panic: 

    VFS: Cannot open root device "sdc1" or 08:21
    Please append correct "root=" option
    Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount rootfs on 08:21

Apparently grub can't see /dev/sdc1 even though from sda I can do:  

    $ ls -l /dev/sdc1
    brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 33 2004-03-14 16:51 /dev/sdc1

If I mount the root partition of sdc (sdc1) on the sda mount point,
/mnt/debinst: 

    $ ls -l /mnt/debinst/vmlinuz
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2004-08-23 00:01 
        /mnt/debinst/vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-2.6.7-1-386   
  

Haines Brown