the machine has 2 SCSI disks, both with multiple partitions with various
bootable linux distributions for testing and packaging software.

the grub menu.lst entries for the 1st disk (sda) have been correct and boot,
but for partitions on the 2nd disk (sdb) the entries are wrong,
they use (hd0,*)  instead of (hd1,*).

here one example from a generated entry in menu.lst for a SLES9 in /dev/sdb6

        ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Novell/SuSE SLES9 (/dev/sdb6)###
        title Novell/SuSE SLES9 (/dev/sdb6)
            kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 vga=0x31a selinux=0 splash=silent console=tty0 resume=/dev/hda3 elevator=cfq show
opts
            initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd

this should be (hd1,5) instead of (h0,5) for kernel and initrd!