[clue-tech] Help Recovering from grub-install error

[David Anselmi]

gthrelk at comcast.net wrote:
> Ok, I messed up - AGAIN!    
> 
> I have a dual-boot machine with Win 98se and Fedora 3 on separate disks.  I was 
> using grub for the dual boot but had a problem with Win 98se and did an fdisk 
> /mbr to bypass the grub boot process.  After booting directly into Windows and 
> fixing the windows problem,  I made the mistake of going to Linux and issuing a 
> grub-install  /dev/hda1 (first disk - first partition).  Now grub comes up again 
> but I can only boot into Fedora.

Where was grub before you started, hda or hda1?  What does "only boot to 
  fedora mean"?  Is there a Windows option that doesn't boot or no 
option at all?  If it doesn't boot, what does it say?

You haven't lost your data, everything about Windows is fine except the 
boot partition.  You can copy off the data and reinstall, which might be 
quickest, or you can understand your partition tables and MBRs well 
enough to fix them (that's my vote, then you might learn enough not to 
break them in the future).

I don't have time to speculate more at the moment, but send me the 
output of these commands:

sudo dd if=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 | xxd > hda.txt
sudo dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1 | xxd > hda1.txt

I'm not sure it matters, but the output of fdisk -l for each hard disk 
might help too.

Dave