[ken_yap]

Not so fast, there are a few odd things about your situation.

The 1024 cylinder (500MB) limit is really old, it is only found on BIOSes older than 15 years or so.

The 128GiB limit is about 10 years old.

Looking at your partition sizes the puzzling thing is that your first Linux partition should be under the 128GiB limit. Also it did manage to load the kernel when the boot sector was on sdb.

So something fishy is going on.

Do you get an interactive GRUB prompt? If so what happens if you do this:

root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vm

At this point you can try to do file completion with TAB and see if you get the BIOS limit message.

You can also try to start GRUB from a rescue disk and see if you can interactively load the kernel.

Also did stage 1.5 get loaded, it should say what stages it is loading. And do you still get the reference to (hd1,4)/boot/message?

Another thing is your menu.lst might be wrong. When you had the IDE disk in place, the SATA disk would pushed back to hd1. Now that you have removed the IDE disk, the SATA disk is back at hd0. So all references to hd1 in menu.lst would have to edited to hd0. That would explain the (hd1,4)/boot/message not found.