Weird Boot failure

[Robert E. Harvey, M.D.]

I've just installed Slackware 9.1 and would like to use Grub 0.94 to 
boot to it and other OSs. I get a kernel panic with the following maneuvers:

root (hd0,1) #no problem. The file system is correctly identified

kernel /vmlinuz-ide-2.4.22 root=/dev/sda5 ro hdc=ide-scsi        # no 
problem. the kernel is identified

boot        # A problem: see below for error messages

kmod: failed to exec /wbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2

VFS Cannot open root device "sda5" or 08:05

Please append a correct "root=" boot option

Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 08:05

The Slackware boot disk I made during installation works perfectly and 
takes me to the Slackware CLI.  The boot prompt states that root (/) 
will be /dev/sda5

Midnight commander identifies /boot as being on /dev/sda2 and / as being 
on /dev/sda5


On the same machine (with a swapout drive mounting Gentoo and LFS) I 
have no problem with this grub.conf:

title=Bob's Gentoo 1.4 (genkernel generated kernel 2.4.20-gentoo-r8)
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/bzImage root=/dev/sda3 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd-2.4.20-gentoo-r8

title=Linux from Scratch (manual 2.4.22 kernel)
root (hd0,3)
kernel /boot/lfskernel root=/dev/sda4 ro


What can I do to fix Grub and Slackware?

Thanks.