Grub can't boot hda1 (vfat/diagnostics), need to do something from DOS?

["A. F. Cano" <afc@shibaya.lonestar.org>]

Hello, and happy new year to all,

On a brand new HD, I made a small partition (32M) exactly like the one
on the old disk.  Copied (with tar) the contents as the drive was
mounted from a usb carrier.  Then I moved it to the main drive caddy
and installed Lenny in the rest of the drive.  Grub recognized the
vfat partition (the bootable flag is set) and created the necessary
entry in the boot menu, but when selected at boot time I get this:

Booting Dell Diagnostics
root(hd0,0)
Filesystem type is fat, partition type 0x6
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader + 1
This is not a bootable disk, Please mount a bootable floppy and 
press any key to try again...

Do I need to run something from DOS?  What am I missing?

Thanks

A.