USB booting :: Grub error 17

grub 0.97-2 ....

qemu works fine but booting just get grub prompt ....

then loads up my main system as normal

I was getting an error 17 during boot for an IDE drive setup as /dev/hda1. The problem was the partition type wasn't set properly. For some reason it thought the partition type was FAT16 instead of Linux. Fixing that using cfdisk solved the boot error.

original here.