You may find that grub is pretty useless when your menu.lst is missing or misconfigured. It’s not easy to figure out how to make grub tell you where the files are that you need. Here’s how to find what you need in order to boot, just using the grub bootloader.

Look in the directory /dev/disk/by-id to see how your attached storage devices are mapped in dev. If they are not already identified by UUID or Label, they will just get the next available letter in the alphabet. sda, sdb, then sdc, etc. The reason why you want to see them “by-id” is because if you plug in multiple devices in a different order one day, you may find what was “sdb3″ yesterday is “sdc3″ today. Look up the Universally Unique Identifier using the blkid command (part of e2fsprogs) The identifiers are generated when partitions are created. Non partitioned devices will not have these identifiers. Use of UUIDs are preferred over Labels since Labels are not unique.