Hello everyone,

I was (of course) experimenting with splashimages for grub and it corrupted my boot somehow.

Grub starts.
Grub can boot linux.
Grub can not boot windows (screen is filled with "GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB")
Grub's menu.lst is set up correctly with Win98 as my first partition:

title Windows
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Booting Win98 CD rom directly to MS-DOS works but C: is bad filesystem.
fdisk /mbr does not help.
Re-installing grub (and re-search for partitions) does not help.

Here is the wierd part:
Linux can mount /dev/hda1 (windows) with no problems at all. Reading and writing to hda1 is perfect.

Probably the bootblock for hda1 is corrupt or something. I am reluctant to reinstall windows yet again. Any ideas or quick-fixes?

I'd say you re-installed grub into the partition that contains Win98.
Not good - seriously not good.

If so, I'd be betting on a re-install as the boot sector record will be trashed (Win98 doesn't have a fixboot command that I know of).

If it is win 98, bear with me it's been a while, wouldn't a dos disk to boot up with then a simple fdsik /mbr restore this?

You are right. I think I acidentally installed grub to /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda.
Unfortunatley fdisk /mbr does not solve it.

Who would think that after all these years I mess up newbie way.
Oh well. Gonna re-install the sucker then.

Thanks for your time.

That's because it's the solution to a different problem.
After either "fdisk /mbr" or a Windows re-install, you will have to re-install grub to get it back in the MBR.

The later windows variants provide "fixboot" to (supposedly) rectify this problem, although I have heard that it doesn't always work.
Must test it one day.