SCHEISSE...

I declined to install grub... this last time...

and installed Grub from Puppy linux.

Didn't have the "quiet" option.

SCSI.

At the last part, hundreds of lines of error messages... finally it comes to that.

(hd2,0) is a SCSI drive.

If I recall correctly there's a cheat-code to force recognition of SCSI.

It listed available partitions to boot, but all on IDE.