[CentOS] HELP, I accidentally initialized my /boot partition

Mon Aug 20 20:27:45 UTC 2007
Alfred von Campe <alfred at von-campe.com>

> A few more details about the failure mode might get you better help -
> "didn't work as expected" is not very descriptive. Did you try to
> reboot?  What happened?  What else have you tried?  Can you boot from
> rescue media?  What is currently in /boot/...?

The answer to the last question is "nothing".  It was the /boot  
partition I accidentally did a mkfs on!  And "didn't work as  
expected" simply means that the system didn't boot.  Fortunately, my  
root partition an all the other partitions where not affected.   
Thanks to the earlier replies from Ross Walker, I was able to recover  
my system using roughly the following steps:

   1. Boot from CentOS 4.5 CD #1 in rescue mode
   2. chroot /mnt/sysimage
   3. mount /dev/hda1 /boot
   4. rpm -e grub kernel
   5. yum install grub kernel
   6. e2label /dev/hda1 /boot
   7. reboot

Whew!  I was really sweating bullets for a couple of hours.  I would  
have hated to rebuild this system from the ground up (the OS is the  
easy part as I have a kickstart script, but I've installed Oracle and  
a bunch of other things that would have taken days to reinstall).

Anyway, thanks all for the replies, I am now up and running again.

Alfred