Screwed Up Grub!

[ben2k]

I was trying to install Karmic onto a USB drive as a full install instead of a boot CD image, and I seem to have seriously screwed up grub on my hard disk as a result.

I'm running 9.10 64 bit with grub 0.97, NOT grub2.

I tried to restore grub from the 9.04 CD using the instructions at help.ubuntu.com, specifically:

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/disk-1 /dev/sda

and that seemed to run without problems, but the system boots to the grub prompt.

Also tried supergrub. Supergrub has no problem finding the installed Linux kernels and the copy of Windows I have, and it has no trouble booting to karmic. But it doesn't seem to fix anything persistent. If I try booting the hard drive, I'm back to prompt. Booting from supergrub works fine.

Even tried reinstalling grub then running the grub-install incantation again.

My partition setup looks like this:

Filesystem Mounted on
/dev/sda5 /
/dev/sda2 /Windoze
/dev/sda6 /boot
/dev/sda7 /home
/dev/sda8 /usr/local

I'm sure this is probably simple if I knew the correct grub syntax. Can someone clue me in?

[Leppie]

booting off the jaunty livecd, issue these commands:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/temp/boot
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/temp
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/temp/boot
sudo grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/mnt/temp /dev/sda