Well, in terms of differing in grub depending on the Linux version, this is true in some cases.
What version and distro of Linux are you using?
Any sata drives on the system, or a PCI controller that any ide or sata drives are connected to? The other issue is raid ide onboard, where you can use the first raid ide device as an ide drive only?
If you look at the /boot/grub/devices.lst file, it should tell you what the designations are.
Also, type in fdisk -l as root user in a console (that is the letter l, not the number 1), you will see the general linux designations, say hda, hdb...depending on how many drives are in the system.