[arch-general] Problems installing Arch on external HDD

Hi all, I am having problems installing Arch on an external HDD (the internal hard disk in the laptop died...). It is a BIOS system with MBR. I decided to use grub as bootloader, but when I reboot after the initial installation process I am stuck at the "Welcome to GRUB" screen with a blinking cursor. It does not continue with boot or drop me to grub shell. I partitioned the drive as per the Installation Guide, and also edited the HOOKS line in mkinitcpio.conf to put 'block' right after 'udev' as per the wiki page on installing to a USB stick. Does anyone have any idea what might be the problem here? Cheers! Murari