Hosed Grub with the push of a button

[max]

I hosed grub. I need to fix it. I booted from fedora rescue. I chroot to 
/mnt/sysimage. All good. I tried :

grub-install  /dev/sda

The  file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly

tried:

grub-install /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

The file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly


tried:

cd /boot/grub

cat stage1

output maybe human readable by some humans but not this one.

So far I can still see all the user files so I can backup and reinstall 
but that wouldn't teach me anything.
All suggestions/insults/how-to's welcome.

Max