The following two lines are incorrect in code listing 16.14: splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda3 With the example setup given in the rest of the document, the correct lines would be: splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz kernel /bzImage root=/dev/hda3 This is because the boot partition is separate from the root partition in the setup example given. If the boot partition wasn't separate, the lines of code in code listing 16.14 would be correct. Since the boot partition is separate, the leading /boot leads to a system that cannot be booted from hard disk. The situation is easily remedied by booting to a livecd, mounting the boot partition (/dev/hda1 in the example), and editing menu.lst to fix the 2 erroneous lines.
I just was informed that there should have been a symlink, /boot/boot, pointing to /boot This symlink wasn't there because emerge system had failed on grub due to the fact that /boot couldn't be remounted in rw mode because it was mounted as vfat (perhaps because win2k had previously been installed on that hard drive?). I therefore had to manually unmount /dev/hda1 and remount it with the "-t ext3" switch. This apparently caused the symlink to either disappear or to not be created in the first place.
