I do something like this all the time, except that I symlink /vmlinuz and /initrd
to the appropriate files in /boot. Here's one of my stanzas:
title Goddard LXDE i686 Nouveau (sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sda5 3 selinux=0
initrd /initrd
Note the root=/dev/sda5 param on the kernel line above