So I'm using a Live disk after I screwed up my linux partition last night. The strange part is that usually I a better explanation to what happen. I've been running crunchbang for a few months now without any problems.

last night I updated/upgraded my system. No errors but it was acting extremely odd afterward. Finally I had to hard reboot. It loaded in to grub rescue, but there was no options. I realize then, that the reason why commands weren't working is because something had happened to my boot partition.

I've been trying to examine it. I can't mount it.
fdisk recognizes it as a linux partition, gparted doesn't know what type of filesystem it is. I was just about to format and reinstall when I got to wondering if there was anything actually on it still on it.
when I run:
There appears to be something of a partition table, but I don't exactly know what I am looking for.
Has anyone ever seen this?

What I was wondering is, how unique is one MBR bootstrap code area from another? If I were to make another ext4 drive and dd the first 440 bytes to my screwed up drive is it possible that I could at least make it mountable?

It don't hurt to try, but if you don't really know what is missing how to rebuild it? Now if you had a clone or can reproduce that same partition to compare then things would be alot easier. It isnt that hard to replace that broken partition with new one, but would be better to understand what happened.

Regards

yeah, I just took the easy way out and reformatted. It kinda sucks, but this time I divided up my partitions like I should have before.