Pain, Horror and Redemption 1
I updated grub and rebooted.
What followed was 6 hours of endless bootloader overwriting, staying awake till 2am, wiping out the windows bootloader twice, installing Elive, Arch, Mandriva on spare partitions, hoping that somehow i could get the bootloader to boot into my system.
It kept complaining about not being able to find /dev/hdd2, the root filesystem.
Then i realized that in the error messages, it was just mounting all sd* drives.
So I change hdd to sdb and voila!
Today I find out that the IDE and SATA code was merged in the kernel, and the bootloader update probably rewrote the paths or something
Lesson Learned: Read errors properly before doing all sorts of crap.
PHR stories are stories about my own incompetence/stupidity. No product mentioned herein is being insulted unless I specifically say so.