Can't boot Arch from external HDD

Hi, well first off this is not my first Arch Linux installation, I'm using Arch for a little over a year now (coming from slack). But this is my first attempt to have Arch on an external HDD.
Alrighty, the situation is as follows: A rather new computer (supports booting from USB devices and the bios is set to boot from removable devices first) with a built in HDD and an external HDD that's connected to that computer via USB.
What I did: I connected the external HDD to the computer and booted off a 2008.6 Overlord core-CD.
Arch-Live recognized the internal HDD as sda and the external HDD as sdb.
I partitioned the external HDD using cfdisk and ran mkfs.ext3 on it (I didn't use any switches with that).
I started the installer, set my mount points (I should mention I'm not gonna use a swap partition here), installed the packages, well just went through the installation routine and installed grub in the MBR of sdb (the external HDD).
Then I rebooted. And this is what doesn't work: When I boot that computer with the external HDD connected the computer completely hangs right before grub would come up. It freezes completely, ctrl+alt+del doesn't work, I need to use the powerswitch to reboot the computer.
So I put the Arch-CD back in the CD drive trying to boot into my Arch System on the external HDD. So I started typing:
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sdb1 ro vga=773
initrd /boot/kernel26.img
When I try to boot off that grub tells me that there is no such device as hd1,0. The funny thing is, that the auto copmletion in grub works for the kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 but it doesn't for the device /dev/sdb1, in fact even root=/de<tab> returns a "unrecognized string" message.
So this is what I did and I can't boot off my external HDD, neither can I boot into my system on the external hdd from the cdrom.
What am I missing here?

The harddrive you boot from is in my experience always hd0. Could this mean your external disc is hd2?
Have you tried chainloading from the installer cd to your external disc?

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Message was edited by: spudnuty

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OS X 10.5 Leopard's minimum RAM requirements are 512 MBs of RAM.
Your eMac can max out at 2 GBs of RAM.
The specs for the RAM are PC2700 SDRAM, DDR333, 184 pins.
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http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10033

[solved[KERNEL PANIC ARCH-3.4.4-2] can not boot Arch from liveCD (x64)

i have somes problems with several apps and want to fresh installed Arch.
my current file system:
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Yeah that's what I meant. Try to burn a new cd at a slower speed. When the new one is done create a hashsum of the new burn and compare it to the iso you used to burn it with. I only say this because a few times in the past when I had sr0 errors while booting live cds it was because the disk was messed up and I had to burn it again.

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