[NCLUG] grub reinstall and /boot recovery

[Daniel Herrington]

Help!

I'm at my wit's end. Here's the situation:

I've got a laptop that I had RH9 on. I wanted to send it in for service 
(the LCD flickers), so I took the hard drive out and backed it up using 
dd on my desktop machine. I used dd to put the entire /dev/hdb (laptop 
drive) onto /dev/hde (a slightly larger drive on my PC). The "total 
records in" matched the "total records out". I checked the partition 
sizes and everything seemed okay. I loaded the original OS (Win95) onto 
the laptop drive, sent the laptop in for service, and got it back. When 
I attempted "dd if=/dev/hde of=/dev/hdb" on my desktop PC, I got an 
error that dd couldn't finish (the "total records out" was 1 less than 
the "total records in"). When I put the laptop drive back into the 
laptop, it wouldn't boot (not a surprise). I hooked it back up to my 
desktop and verified that the second partition (used for / ) is fine, 
but the first partition (used for /boot ) is corrupted. It's corrupted 
on the backup hard drive as well, so I can't get it back.

However, I have a very similar OS (RH9 with a few extra kernels compiled 
in addition to what the laptop had) on my desktop PC, so I thought I 
could just mkfs.ext3 the laptop drive's first partition, cp -a * from 
the /boot partition of my desktop drive's /boot partition to the laptop 
drive's /boot partition, and then use the boot floppy for the laptop to 
successfully boot... at which point I could run "grub-install /dev/hda" 
or "grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/hda" on the laptop drive. 
This runs just fine, but when I try to boot without the boot floppy, I 
get "Insert disk,..." and a few strange characters.

Assuming I blew away my /boot partition, is there any way for me to 
salvage my OS installation? What are the steps I should take to get it 
back? Am I running the grub reinstall correctly? (I must admit, I've 
never felt as comfortable with grub and how it works as I did with lilo.)

Thanks,
Daniel Herrington