Praise be!! I now have a perfectly working system again. Here's a synopsis for all those who helped, and for the archives for those yet to come.
I managed to splat the 1st 1.4MB of my hard disk by running dd if=boot.img of=/dev/hda bs=1024 instead of dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 with the net result that I had just splatted the MBR and the /boot partition. Other than that I had a happily working system. Here's a few facts/assumptions I had. I had a full and up to date backup (I didn't at the point where I cocked up, but as my machine was still working, I could take one). I had partitioned the disks with fdisk, placing the partitions in sequence and left no holes - hda6 followed straight on from hda5. First I umounted /boot. This partition was stuffed, and I didn't want (know if) faulty inodes would point to blocks on another partition. I dumped /proc/partitions to the printer for reference. I noted that I had /dev/hda1 size 16033KB, /dev/hda2 size 1 /dev/hda5 size 72261KB and /dev/hda6 size 19920568KB This told me I had 1 primary partition and 1 secondary containing two logical partitions. I then ran 'mount' which told me hda1 was /boot hda5 was swap hda6 was / I then used fdisk to rebuild the partition table - i.e. fdisk /dev/hda d<cr>1<cr> # delete faulty primary partitions 1 d<cr>2<cr> d<cr>3<cr> d<cr>4<cr> # through 4 n<cr>p<cr>1<cr>1<cr>+16033K<cr> # create 1st partition from /proc/partitions n<cr>e<cr>2<cr><cr><cr> # create extended part - default full disk n<cr>l<cr><cr>+72261K<cr> # create hda5 n<cr>l<cr><cr>+19920568K<cr> # create hda6 t<cr>5<cr>82<cr> # set hda5 as swap w<cr> By specifying the partition sized in +nK format, the info from the /proc/partitions didn't need converting to cylinder numbers. Having rebuild the partition table I could now rebuilt /boot. I ran mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hda1 and then had the edit /etc/fstab to reference /dev/hda1 instead of the LABEL before I could mount /boot. I then rebuilt the contents by running rpm -i --force kernel-2.4.18-19.7.x.i586.rpm rpm -e grub rpm -i grub-0.91-4.i386.rpm and then copying and editing a suitable /boot/grub/grub.conf. Finally, I ran /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda to re-install the Grub boot loader, crossed by fingers, rebooted, and - lo and behold - it booted fine. -- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000 -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
