cannot reinstall grub after windows xp messes up partitions

Evan White evwhite at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 3 02:19:01 UTC 2005


I'm running a Windows XP / FC3 dual-boot system on a
Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop and it was running fine. 
Here's the partitions from fdisk:

device     start end   Blocks    Id   System
/dev/sda1  1     4462  35840983  7    HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2  4463  8287  30724312  f    W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda3  8288  8300  104422    93   Amoeba
/dev/sda4  8301  12161 31013482  8e   Linux LVM
/dev/sda5  4463  8287  30724281  b    W95 FAT32

Inside the LVM, there is a 2 GB Swap and the rest is
/.

I noticed that the Linux parition showed up in Windows
as F: and was concerned that Windows would somehow
corrupt the partition if it was mounted, so I looked
for ways to hide that partition from Windows.  I ended
up changing my grub.conf file to include this line in
the Windows section: hide (hd0,2)

In hindsight, perhaps it should have been (hd0,3).

Anyways, upon reboot into Windows, I could tell that
Windows did something before I logging me in.  It went
to that light blue screen that it uses for scandisk
for about 2 seconds, then it logged me in.  The F:
drive was still visible, and when I rebooted, I got
the following error:

GRUB Loading stage1.5

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 17


Well I've seen this before, so I booted to my FC3 disk
and typed "linux rescue"  then "chroot /mnt/sysimage".
 I checked my grub.conf, which reads:

title Fedora Core (2.6.10-1.770_FC3)


Then I ran "grub-install /dev/sda" and got this:

The file /boot/grub/stage1 was not read correctly.

I didn't know what that was all about, but after
looking around, I found people suggesting the
following:

#>grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

To which I received:

Error 15: File not found

I am, however, about to browse to /boot/grub/ and I
can see the stage1 file.  But for some reason grub
can't find it.  Someone suggested using grub.img, but
I don't have a floppy drive.  I do, however, have
network/internet access still enable thru FC3 rescue
mode. 

Questions:

Firstly, is the hide command the best way to keep
Windows away from the Linux partition?  What is the
best way?

Secondly, how do I reinstall grub successfully?

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