Question : Debian/Sarge Grub MBR bootage fubared

My grub installation has become corrupted.  I believe it is the MBR part of grub that is corrupted.  When I boot my machine, I just get a black screen.  This was caused by a faulty power connector (where the drive was power-cycled several times rapidly).

I can mount the drives using utilities from a diskette (tom's rtbt), everything seems to be intact, and I've run e2fsck on all drives.  I'm ignorant about how to get it to start the installed copy of Debian manually, or how to repair grub to get it to start automagically.

Roughly: Debian 'Sarge' build.    
/dev/hda1 = /
/dev/hda2 = /swap
/dev/hda6 = /home
/dev/hda7 = /boot

I tried walking through the grub installation utility (manual mount via chroot, load grub, specify root and kernel, and type "boot"), but it unceremoniously dumps me back out of grub without doing anything spectacular.

...Oh, and this is a 450MHz PIII - typical PC hardware - two IDE drives, bootable CDRom and floppy.

I'd love to get a boot diskette working (quickly) and repair the MBR boot option as an optimal solution.  Debian is the only OS on this machine, and reinstallation is an option, but I'd rather fix it than reinstall for what seems like a simple issue.

Many thanks!

Answer : Debian/Sarge Grub MBR bootage fubared

> I tried walking through the grub installation utility (manual mount via chroot, load grub, specify root and kernel, and type "boot")

The process for that should have looked similar to:

mkdir /mnt/sys
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/sys
mount /dev/hda7 /mnt/sys/boot
chroot /mnt/sys
grub-install /dev/hda

Is that what you did?