Hey thanks for your quick replies.
freakyg: I booted into the Fedora rescue mode and it said it was unable to mount /mnt/hda2 because of a bad superblock IIRC. I tried opening it in Knoppix and got the same result. So my question is should using -c instead of -C have completely hosed the partition as it seems to have? Is it likely that this is a bad drive? I've tested it a few times and it's always come back fine. Know any good testing tools?
shams: thanks for the link, the info was quite useful. Unfortunately for my situation the partition seems too corrupt to bother restoring grub, so I just used the windows recovery tools fixboot and fixmbr, so at least I have a working bootable OS. Just not linux