thanks for your quick response,but I have resolved this problem by doing the following
disabled the IDE disk drive in the bios
rebooted using fedora cd in rescue mode
and ran the following commands
chroot /mnt/sysimage
grub
grub>: root (hd0,0)
grub>: setup (hd0)
quit
grub-install /dev/sda
but now I have another problem
the default cd audio device has changed in the following way
I have 2 cdrom devices installed
1 x scsi(scd0) cdwriter
1 x ide(hdc) cd/dvd player(connected to soundcard)
before the upgrade the ide cdrom was loaded via fstab as the default device,the scsi cdwriter device was not loaded by default.
now when you run any of the following cd audio programs they default to the scsi cdwriter
for the following apps
cdplayer
gnome audio players
kde audio players
i can resolve this by typing the following command
ln -sf hdc cdrom
but the application ripperX still fails to run with permission errors accessing "dev/cdrom"
this also occurs with the root account as well as default user accounts
the fstab is configured as follows
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrecorder pamconsole,ro,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom auto pamconsole,ro,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
any ideas ?