Alright, so basically the partition on which FC5 resides is untouched, but I believe that the /boot partition was whiped out and I can no longer point GRUB at a viable kernel path. I had FC5 installed, and then installed SuSE 10.1, and apparently SuSE decided to destroy the /boot partition and put all its junk in there.

I've been using the Yast boot loader config to do all of this.

Things that I've tried:

1) setting the "Kernel" setting to /boot/vmlinuz, which is what SuSE uses to boot. Basically everything works for some reason, except the NIC modules or something. I don't really understand why this works and the next one doesn't...

2) I downloaded the corresponding kernel-2.6.16-1.2122_FC5 rpm from redhat's site, and I took out files destined for the /boot directory, and I copied them over to my own /boot directory. Now, there are only three files that I moved, and one of them is what I believe is pointed to by a default FC5 install/update GRUB file: vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2122_FC5. However, when I point YaST boot loader that file as the "kernel" setting, I get several errors upon booting FC5. They read /lib/modules/kernel-2.6.16-1.2122/modules.dep file does not exist.....but I can see on the root partition (in this case /dev/hde2) that this file and directory clearly do exist. I don't really understand why this is happening when I point to the "right" kernel file to boot, and not when I point to SuSE's kernel file. It's kind of annoying.

So, any suggestions? I kind of guess that I might be going about this completely wrong, but I'm out of ideas, and I've exhausted Google and forum searches for help. Most people seem to lose the ability to boot, but not have the /boot partition completely whiped out.

There many server-based Linux users who would defend to the death the need of using the multiple partitions for a Linux installation.

I don't and I never have had more than one partition for any of my Linux. Each distro has a /boot subdirectory and it is always inside the distro's root "/" directory.

You are a prime example to demonstrate non-server users intending to have more than one distro in a box should steer away from multiple partitions for one distro.

Losing /boot partition for your FC5 means you no longer have a kernel to work on and that takes some doing to compile a new one. So would copying your personal data from FC5 into Suse and then re-installing FC5 be a logical step forward?

I have Fc2 to Fc5 all installed in the same box plus a couple of Suse and none use /boot partition. In fact none of my installed 100+ Linux has a seperate /boot partition but they all boot perfectly by any boot loader I choose.