GRUB toasted, can't boot SuSE 8.2 after partition stupidity
 

I run SuSE 8.2 on a 120 GB HDD with a 722MB partition for swap and the rest taken up by my main Linux partition (EXT3 or Reiser, can't remember off the top of my head). There used to be 8MB of undesignated space at the end of the drive, but I did something boneheaded while trying to install Win2000 and made it into a partition, then deleted it again.

Now linux won't boot, GRUB never shows up. I get "error loading operating system" and that's about it. Everything is intact on the main partition as far as I can tell when I use a rescue boot, but unfortunately I have no idea what to do to get things back the way they should be. Do I need to do something with that partition I blew up?

Thanks in advance!

don't use grub
boot from a floppy

more helpfully

boot from the suse installation cd and chose 'boot installed system', if there is only one version of linux it is fairly automatic, otherwise choose your root parition. then use yast or grub itself to rewrite the boot record.

I attempted to boot the installed system (Option: "Boot from Hard Disk") from the Install CD, but I still get the "error loading operating system" problem. If I boot using the rescue system, and mount the partition with suse on it, is there a way to boot that way? I tried running initrd and some other stuff in my /boot dir (I'm just flailing around trying stuff), but permission is denied on all of that stuff.