grub won't load off hd, grub fails from floppy, 2.12

[sulemasc]

first off i had grub working on this 330mB maxtor drive in question in the past on MBR. i've since reformatted the drive so had to reinstall grub on hda1 ext2 and MBR and it will not boot. i manually made a grub boot disk and typed 'root (hd0,0)' there is a pause and a device not responding message, however if i boot puppy off cd into ram, then run grub in rxvt and type 'root (hd0,0)' the proper message appears recognizing it as ext2. is there any reason why the grub boot floppy cant recognize the hard-drive, and why the drive itself won't load grub? i suspect its a single probleme causing both these symptoms. Should i try a different version of grub?