Not recognizing my grub.conf file

[root]

Hello,
I am having trouble loading grub onto my system and I am hoping you
might be able to help me straighten it out.  I have grub installed and
setup but it doesn't seem to recognize my grub.conf file, which resides
in /boot.  I also made a symbolic link to it in /boot/grub.  Upon boot
it sits in the grub prompt.  If I type in the commands from the
grub.conf file then it will boot.  To get around that I am currently
using a boot diskette but I would like to figure how to make it work.

Here is a little background. 

My system, an HP Pavilion ze5385 laptop, is a dual boot system.  I
deliberately didn't install the boot loader when I installed Red Hat
Linux.  Later, much later, I decided it was time to install the grub
bootloader. Looking through the info doc I found a section detailing how
to install and it went smoothly, up to a point.  I copied the stage*
files into /boot/grub, /boot resides in it's own partition by the way.
I then made a diskette and booted into grub as suggested.  This all
worked fine.  Then I ran the suggested find /boot/grub/stage1 command to
be sure I pointed to the right place.  It failed to find the stage1 file
so I quit the grub boot.  Later, when I was ready to try again, I
noticed that it wouldn't boot any longer from the grub boot diskette,
but I discovered I could boot directly by typing grub in a shell, which
I did.  I probably booted and quit several times before proceeding.
Finally I felt confident and actually did the setup.  The commands I
issued were root (hdo,1); setup(hd0); quit.    

I notice I get the following error messages when I type grub in the
shell.

grub

hdc: packet command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: packet command error: error=0x50
ATAPI device hdc:
  Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
  Invalid field in command packet -- (asc=0x24, ascq=0x00)
  The failed "Start/Stop Unit" packet command was:
  "1b 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 "
  Error in command packet byte 4 bit 0

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
    GRUB  version 0.93  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the
possible
   completions of a device/filename.]

grub> quit 



Here is some output from fdisk
Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1      3810  30603793+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2   *      3811      3813     24097+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3          3824      7296  27896872+   f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5          6905      7165   2096451    b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda6          3824      5799  15872157   83  Linux
/dev/hda7          5800      6568   6176961   83  Linux
/dev/hda8          6569      6904   2698888+  83  Linux
/dev/hda9          7166      7296   1052226   82  Linux swap

Partition table entries are not in disk order

This is for grub version 0.93-4

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.