Whenever Lilo used to mess up with Woody, I'd:
1) Boot from the Woody CD.
2) Mount my existing single Debian partition as /
3) Execute a shell
4) Make sure /vmlinuz and /vmlinuz-old pointed to the right
places in /boot.
5) Exit the shell.
6) Run "make system bootable." which would Lilo it up.
Today I horked my Sarge Grub install, booted from the Sarge CD,
screwed up my paritions when I tried to do (2) (because creating,
formatting, and mounting partitions is all connected), verified
4) was correct, couldn't figure out how to do 6), and running
"upgrade-grub" from within a chroot didn't work.
When I entered "partition my disks," formatting my swap part was
already highlighed. I picked my big Debian ReiserFS part and told
it not to format it, but to mount it as /, and clicked Finish.
D-I told me it was going to make changes to my partition table,
even though I didn't tell it to change any partitions. Somehow
when it was done my swap part was gone.
In Sarge D-I, how can I just mount something as / without changing
part tables or formatting anything, and run the "make system bootable"
step to recover from botched grub?
Or how can I do it from within a chroot. I don't usually keep a second
install of Debian around to chroot from, so I'd have to chroot from
the Sarge emergency shell or (less desirably) a Knoppix CD.
For now I just reinstalled the OS. It takes me 30 minutes with scripts.
But I looked like a tool having to do that.