GRUB on software raid: Filesystem type is unknown, partition type 0xfd

[David Landgren <david@landgren.net>]

Hello List,

on a healthy system with soft RAID1, GRUB tells me the following:

grub> root (hd0,
 Possible partitions are:
   Partition num: 0,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
   Partition num: 4,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
   Partition num: 5,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
   Partition num: 6,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
   Partition num: 7,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x82
   Partition num: 8,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd

and

grub> find /vmlinuz
 (hd0,0)
 (hd1,0)


On a system that appears to be rather ill (booted with a grub-floppy), I 
get:

   Partition num: 0,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xfd
   Partition num: 4,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
   Partition num: 5,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
   Partition num: 6,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
   Partition num: 7,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x82
   Partition num: 8,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xfd

Partition 0 corresponds to / and 8 is /home (/dev/hda9 and /dev/hdc9 
ganged together).

I can't actually tell whether partition 0 on this machine contains a 
readable /vmlinuz. When I try the find command in grub, it only looks at 
the floppy. And since the filesystem type is unknown, I wonder if it 
could anyway.

On /home there a number of files on it that were changed since the last 
backup that I need to retrieve. I could throw the rest away. What's my 
best way forward?

I should be able to create rescue and root floppies, but what then?

Since I know that /dev/hd[ac]9 is supposed to be ext2fs, can I repair it 
without trashing the contents?

I could live with replacing /dev/hda1 with a new / partition if necessary.

what post mortem analysis can I perform to find out exactly what 
happened with this box?

Thanks for any clues, pointers and advice I can use.

David