device.map not working on floppy boot

[michael]

briefly i'm using a sata disk as root with ide disks in removable
trays. removing ide disks means the the number of ides woud change
where the sata disk is mapped, so i'm using the device.map file.

only problem is the device.map file only works when booting from a
hard disk. when booting from a floppy there is no effect, ie. the
drives that would normally be used are used rather than the remapped
drives.

if someone could back to me on this asap i would apreciate it. this
issue has proven quite troubling requiring that special boot disks
must be made for a given harddrive configuration.

notes: after using grub-install with the floppy disk, it reports
proper device mapping. but on boot the wrong device is found. ie:
normally sda is mapped to hd0, but on floppy boot grub attempts to
access  hda for instance and reports the boot partition does not
exist. if however i edit the menu.lst file to boot in what would be
the default mapping without device.map, the boot is fine.... just very
inconvenient finding and creating boot disks.

sincerely,

michael