undetectable ext3 partition, but mountable and accessible, unable to boot
 

i recently installed RH9, and apt-getted/yummed it to fedora. doo doo doo, i was using xp for a couple days, then i decided to go into linux for some fun...but for some weird reason during booting grub gave me a error 18. so i was like hmmmm damn it! so i popped in my RH9 install, and went into rescue mode. it was weird because it couldn't detect my ext3 partition. so i went to my mandrake 9.2 and tried to use that to rescue and see if i could install grub from that. undetectable again. so i decided maybe i could mount the partition and run grub from that. viola! it mounted, and i could access all files. so my partition is not corrupted...i think. i tried grub-install...but since there was no grub in /sbin/grub...it didn't work too well. i guess i coulda linked it, but i didn't think of that until now, after which i had to restore the ntfs loader. i also tried going through the RH9 install process, and wait up until the bootloader part, install it, and then just reset. but for some reason the partition table on my HD was screwed up, so it couldn't detect it.

my windows is on it's own hard drive. linux was on my second hard drive. i don't think the partition table is screwed up, because i use my second hard drive as the swap file for windows (as fat32 for easier transfer between windows and linux).

anyways....any insight on how to fix this? or do i have to do yet another linux reinstall :'(

Try using the rescue system again. This time use chroot to change to your / partition before issuing grub-install. If you have a working Linux system then read man chroot before you use chroot, or you could find man chroot with Google.

"but for some reason the partition table on my HD was screwed up, so it couldn't detect it."

If your partition table is screwed up then all bets are off. You may have to use fdisk to recreate one or more partitions which will cause you to lose all data in one or more partitions, perhaps every partition on the disk.

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Steve Stites