For some reason when I used the network-installer for Debian, grub failed to recognize my Redhat 9 partition(totally ignored) and either misread or mis configured my WinXP pro partition. It gives me the option to boot into the windows partition but stops and says that it's an unrecognizable partition or something. It gives me the hex value '0x07'.

does anyone know how to tell grub to rescan? or to autoconfigure? there must be a way to get it to research the hard drive partitions and look for bootable operating systems. please help, i'm new to grub and debian for that matter.

thank-you in advance.

Take a look at this:
http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/
There is aanother article for SuSe somewhere, lost it right now.

This is a problem caused by some versions of parted, it looks like that's causing your trouble too.

Thanks pingu for posting that link. It was really helpful. I followed the advice and it worked perfectly.

Here's what I did:

1. boot up into linux.
2. type the command 'sfdisk -d /dev/hda>partition_info.txt' into the console.
3. enter the command 'vim partition_info.txt' and edit out any warnings so that I could use this same info as the input for the next command. It should look something like this:

# partition table of /dev/hda
unit: sectors

/dev/hda1 : start= 63, size= 16771797, Id= 7, bootable
/dev/hda2 : start= 16771860, size=217632555, Id= f
/dev/hda3 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/hda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/hda5 : start= 16771923, size=104856192, Id= 7
/dev/hda6 : start=121628178, size=112776237, Id= 7

4. type the command 'cat partition_info.txt | sfdisk --no-reread -force -H255 /dev/hda'

5. reboot.

you can go to the link that was posted above to read the technical about this error. Yes, the site talks about it from the Fedora Core 2 stand point but the problem is not will Fedora, it's will GRUB. So all linux distro's could be effected by this bug.

I hope this was helpful. Feel free to tell me if it was.

that is very helpful quent. i'm sure it will help others because i think this problem is becoming very common-place. thanks!