I've searched up and down for a while now, and maybe im retarded, but cant find enough info to solve my problem. So please forgive me if im posting a question that has been asked thousands of time before.

Long story short, somehow i messed up my MBR bad enough to give me an error message that says "No boot sector found on hard disk" + "No bootable devices" on startup of my laptop. I have my Red Hat 8.0 installation CD's, and have read that its possible to re-install GRUB after entering the "linux rescue" mode. What i havent been able to figure out, because im such a newbie, is where to locate the GRUB RPM, and how to install it back to my MBR. I know for sure that my Linux and WinXP partitions are still there, something just got screwy in my MBR. Can someone please walk me through this step by step. I basically know how to navigate through directories and use RPM, but mounting is a new concept for me and from what ive tried, mounting another CD from my second CD drive doesnt seem to work in the "rescue" mode. But then again, i may be doing it all wrong because ive never sucessfully mounted a CD or Floppy before. Thank you soo much in advance for any help or ideas you may have.

boot up with the rescue disk. login as root.

type in grub (it will probe devices and give you the grub prompt )

#Assuming your boot partition is /dev/hda7 substitute #accordingly
root (hd0,6)
setup (hd0)
quit

That should do it. Assuming that all that's gone is the boot code in the MBR.

Ok, im not sure if im logged in as root. Im sorry, i probably should have put this in the newbie section. But repairing my MBR seemed a little more advanced. Can someone please post the steps on how to login as root so i can do this correctly. Is GRUB on the first RH8 install CD (the one i use to boot, cause my MBR is all messed up) or should i put one of the other 5 install disks in my second drive? Also, you said that once i get the prompt i can fix it from there. But i read another post where someone found the package and used 'grub-install /dev/hda'. Which method do you think is better? Or if they're the same, which is easier for a newbie like me? Thanks.

Andrew

Boot off your Red Hat install disk, and choose the option for "rescue system" or "boot installed system" or something like that. Eventually, a log in prompt will come up. Type root, hit enter, then enter your password. If you're totally new to Linux, you will notice that you are typing blind, meaning that no asterisks come up for your password. This can be a bit disconcerting at first, but its normal. Press enter when you're done typing your password and you're in.