[F9] laptop not booting - reinstall MBR?

[Don Levey]

Phil Meyer wrote:
 >
 > Ah, yes a different reason for grub to fail -- the file system 
containing its files cannot be mounted.
 >
Interestingly, I just tried manually mounting the disk:

     mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sysimage

and I can get a directory listing.  So at least *part* of this is 
working.  From there, I was manually able to run 'chroot /mnt/sysimage' 
without error, and it seems to have "taken".  However, trying to run 
grub-install gave me:

     /dev/sda: Not found or not a block device

Running the second option (--no-floppy --recheck) gave me:

     Probing devices to guess BIOS drives.  This may take a long time
     No suitable drive was found in the generated device map.
     Reverting to backed up copy.

 > You can:
 >
 > # fdisk -l
 >
 > to get a list of partitions and partition types.  Hopefully you can 
identify which ones are /boot, swap, and /
 >
 >
Done - no problem.  There's /, /home, and swap.

 > If so, a fsck of /boot and / partitions MAY fix it.
 >
 > # /sbin/fsck.ext3 /dev/sdN
 > where N == /boot and/or the / partition
 >
 > If not, yes, you are probably hosed.

Running fsck.ext3 *says* that the partitions are clean.  If I need to, I 
guess I could get the data off of the drive and install on another, but 
I was hoping to avoid that.  Feh...

Thanks for your help,
  -Don