I think I blew away my grub (old redhat 4)
 

Folks

I think I did a major goof. I issued a command I found on a website without checking exactly what my config was (yep, I see you shaking your head now ... what ever your saying is perhaps true)

I ran:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

so, after trying to get my rhel to reboot this morning the expected happened ... nothing

well ... the grub prompt is all. I've tried using the redhat recover option to attempt to reload a boot loader on /dev/sda (the main system is apparently on /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00). But this just fails saying nothing will be done as I've not got any new modules to install.

so, have I wiped out my main system or have I got a chance to recover this?

btw ... if someone gets a laugh out of this then it won't have been pointless.

:-)

You've formatted /dev/hda1. I don't see much chance of recovery.

By the way, what kernel version does Red Hat 4 run? Is it a 1.x.x?
I ask because when the Linux 2.0 came out with a module that supported my ATI graphics card Red Hat was the first distro to release a version with 2.0 kernel and I thought I remembered it as being RH5.

It's been a long time since I manually changed my ext2 filesystem to ext3, but I do remember the main argument to the command was -j, to enable the journal.

if I do a uname -a I get:
so I think its 2.x.x