grub configuration with removable linux partitions

I am having trouble setting up Grub to boot properly on my laptop. Here's my setup. On my primary harddrive I have a 200 MB /boot partition at the beginning of the drive. The remainder of the drive is my windows partition. I then have a second removable harddrive that I swap in and out with my CD Rom drive (CD Rom drive can only be installed when I intend to run linux). The second harddrive contains my Redhat 9.0 partition. Now here's the problem.

When my second harddrive is in, I can boot into windows or redhat (i.e. the grub menu comes up successfully). When I take out the second harddrive I can't boot into anything, all I see is GRUB at the top of the screen (no menu, just the word GRUB). I figured out that grub places the second stage install on the removable llinux partition, which is why GRUB doesn't load right when the removable harddrive is not present.

My question is, is there a way to place all the grub files necessary to boot the computer (second stage install) into the /boot partition located on the primary drive so that when the second harddrive isn't present, I can still boot into windows? If there is a way of doing this, how do I do it? Thanks in advance for the help.

It seems strange that RedHat would do that, but I do agree with you that it seems that way.
See the texinfo docs for GRUB, and you'll find the top-level node "Installation". Check that out, and you'll find what you need.