Moving from Lilo to Grub

Is a pain in the ass, or at least it was for me. I have been a die hard lilo fan for a fair while but I wanted to try Xen which meant I needed to use Grub. The biggest problem I had was not realizing that if your grub.conf file is missing then you need to boot manually from the grub command line. The command line is actually quite simple once you know the steps to boot your machine (If you get a VFS error you probably don't have your file system built into your kernel, try again).

Not knowing how the hell

title blah
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-nnnnnn root=/dev/sda2

the bits in bold above related to each other I created 4 entries in

/boot/grub/grub.conf

and tried each in turn until I realized that

root (hd0,0) is the partition my /boot/*files* are on

and

root=/dev/sda2

is the actual root file system. Would it not have been simpler doing

title blah
    boot (hd0,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-nnnnnn root=/dev/sda2