Grub failing ot install to mbr

[Yan Seiner]

I have a remotely administered machine that has lost its boot sector.  
This machine has worked fine for several years.  We recently tried to 
update the kernel.  On a reboot, the local sysadmin noticed some sort of 
error flash by on the screen, and now the machine won't boot.  We can't 
seem to get grub back into the MBR.

We've created a grub floppy and reinstalled the stage 1, 1.5, and 2 loaders.

Now on reboot we're getting a message that says,

"Console redirect"

and the machine freezes.

As far as we know, console redirection is not enabled anywhere on the 
machine.

So.... Is it possible that grub used some random file rather than its 
stage 1 loader?

The machine has a boot partition, and we used

grub> find /grub/stage1

hd(0,0)
hd(1,0)

grub> root hd(0,0)
grub> setup hd(0)
grub> root hd(1,0)
grub> setup hd(1)

to install the bootloader on both RAID-1 mirrors.  Grub installed 
everything without any errors.

Anyone have any suggestions?  I'm pretty stumped....

--Yan