So, something happened to my linux box on christmas day. The short story is, the mbr somehow got screwed up and i had to reinstall grub to the mbr.

The long story is that I was tired and didn’t feel like looking into it right then. I ran spinrite overnight (really aught to buy a legitimate copy of that) and went to sleep. The next morning spinrite came up fine for all my hdd’s, system still wouldn’t boot. So, i booted up my knoppix disc and did a file system check. My / partition had a few errors which it fixed. Reboot. Still won’t boot. The system would come up to the point where i would usually see the 3 second timeout for grub and just do nothing. This is where i decided to reinstall grub and see if that fixed it. I booted into knoppix again ran grub and issued these commands.

root (hd0,0)

setup (hd0)

quit

hd0 is my first hdd. ,0 specifies the partition (i have my /boot on sda1 and my / on sda2). This fixed it and now i’m back in business.