grub-install seems to be wiping my partitions

[Duncan Lithgow]

Sounds strange to you too? It does to me, here\s what\s happening...

I recently installed win2000 at the front of my drive, knowing it
would mess my boot loader (grub) but expecting I could fix it, I have
before.

So I threw in FC3 disk one, got to the command line chrooted to
/mnt/sysimage and ran grub/install hd0. Maybe that wasn\t a good idea
after all...

On rebooting it seemed to work when I booted into windows so I thought
I\d try fc3 and rebooted. Grub Error 22, something about can\t find
stage1-5. So, I put FC3 Disk1 in again and ran that - this time it
refuses to mount the old system saying "no linux partitions found" -
my blood pressure rises...

I thought "that can\t be and threw in PartitionMagic - "partition
Table error", So I tried Knoppix, it found two drives, one the win2000
partition and the other and unmountable, unrecognised section. It
should have found about 7.

So, I guessed that I\d somehow lost my partitions and went looking for
a solution. Found TestDisk, got win2000 installed again - that being
the only partition I could risk playing with. Ran TestDisk, great wee
program, worked fine, found the 'deleted' partitions and restored them
- windows could see the big fat32 partition with all my non-system
files and things looked good. But then as I went through the process
of getting grub working, same as above - it did the same thing again.

So now I\m using gmails web interface and Knoppix and hoping someonw
knows what's going on - I'm going to bed.

Duncan