[kwlug disc.] am I asking too much of grub?

[Chris Bruner]

I'm trying to boot off a usbkey using grub as my boot loader.
I've gotten it to the point where it loads the stage2, but it can't seem 
to understand the filesystem on the usbkey. (ext2)

My system is configured as
/dev/hda1   swap
/dev/hda2   linux (ext2)

sda1   linux (ext2)

I've also given it space at the beginning of the usbkey to have the grub 
stage 1 part, so the start block of the partition is 2 instead of the 
normal 1.

The grub menu.lst is

Title RoboDev
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz-2.6.25 root=/dev/sda1 ro vga 773

and so on

Instead of the normal grub menu coming up, I get the grub command prompt.

It seems it doesn't even get to the menu.lst
Trying to do a manual load of the config file and kernel is similarly 
fruitless, but I am able to load the files from the hard disk.

Does anyone have any idea what could be wrong?