Reinstalling grub?

[Knute Johnson]

>> I'm with you Nigel but how does grub know that the Linux drive is
>> hdb?
>>
>Mainly because if you have 2 harddrives, and Windows is on the first one 
>(hda), Grub is not going to be on that, as it's a linux bootloader.
>
>Say for instance you only had one harddrive. You have installed Windows first 
>on the drive, so it is labelled as hda1, and boots up using the windows 
>bootloader, using ntldr. You now install FC5 on the same drive (presuming 
>that you have free space on the drive). You create a / partition for FC5, say 
>this is hda3, and a /home partition hda4. Grub is waiting to be installed 
>somewhere, and you are given options as to where you want to install it 
>during the OS install. The default option is the MBR, and if you go for this 
>Grub will be installed in the MBR of hda (where windows was booting from), 
>but will add a chainloader entry to /boot/grub/grub.conf , so that you can 
>not only boot up FC5, but Windows too, as you know.
>
>If you had to reinstall the Windows OS (a common occurence) , the MBR would be 
>taken over by the Windows bootloader (ntldr), and now you need to reinstall 
>Grub on the MBR (the situation you find yourself in). 
>
>You now load the 1st FC5 cdrom, and type linux-rescue. this will give you 
>options for the harddrive partition you want to work with. You know that 
>Windows is on hda1 so thats not the correct option, as Grub isn't on that. 
>The only other option should be hda3, which is the / partition for FC5, and 
>Grub is set up on that, but not installed to be used as a bootloader at the 
>moment. 
>
>Back to the linux-rescue disc, choose hda3 as the harddrive partition, which 
>will get you a command prompt. Type. chroot /mnt/sysimage . this will get you 
>another command prompt. Now you can put Grub wherever you like, but were 
>going to put back in the MBR of hda where the reinstall of Windows had 
>removed it from. So you type. grub-install /dev/hda  , and if all goes well 
>Grub should be reinstalled in the MBR of hda, and when you next reboot you 
>should get a Grub menu with options for FC5, and "other" which will be 
>Windows.
>
>I had a lot of problems with bootloaders initially when working with Linux, 
>but over time I have become more clued up as how how they work. 
>
>Post back if you still have problems in getting this working again.
>
>Nigel.

Well, the good news is I'm back.  The bad news is, it didn't work.  
Here is what I did:

Booted from FC5 CD #1

linux rescue
chroot /mnt/sysimage
/sbin/grub-install /dev/sda
/dev/sdb1 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive

So what does that mean?

Thanks,

-- 
Knute Johnson
Molon Labe...