grub with sata drives?

["Thomas H. George" <lists@tomgeorge.info>]

I have two sata drives, sda and sdb with the root partition on sdb.  I
installed grub on sdb and made the following entries in
/boot/grub/menu.lst:

kopt=root=/dev/sdb1
groot=(sdb,0)

and ran update-grub.

Next I tried to boot the system and got the splash screen with my
kernels listed but then a message:

root (sdb,0)
Error 23: Error while parsing number

I have tried using grub's line completion to find a correct entry for
groot.  If I enter:

grub> groot=(sd

followed by a tab I get:

groot=(sdiff)

If I try groot=(hd 

followed by a tab I get nothing.

Surely there must be many users booting from sata drives so there must
be a simple solution to my problem but a google search finds numerous
instructions for booting with grub but all the examples appear to be for
ide hard drives - that is groot=(hd0,0).

Help, 
Tom