Problems reinstalling grub/lilo (they always hang at boot time ...)

I suddenly cannot boot my ubuntu (5.04) linux system anymore (nor windows).
Everything worked fine until yesterday, but since I last shut down my linux
system I cannot boot any OS :(

Grub hangs after displaying the following messages:

Grub loading Stage1.5
Grub loading, please wait...

I've booted my system via the SystemRescueCD and
I've followed the instructions on the Grub wiki
http://grub.enbug.org/GrubLegacy in the troubleshooting section, but
unfortunately without any success. Using the described method via chroot
actually does not work since grub-install then cannot find "sort" and other
tools. But if I only mount the /boot partition I can then reinstall grub,
but the loader then still hangs ...

One possible problem I've noticed is, that I get a warning when I mount
the /boot partition. It is a ext3 partition, but is only mounted as ext2
(ext2_fill_super warning). Is there anything I need to (can) do about this?

Next I tried to install lilo:

I booted via SysRescCD and mounted /dev/hdb1 as /boot
and /dev/mapper/vg00-root as /mnt/sysimage. I then ran

lilo -C /mnt/sysimage/etc/lilo.conf -b /dev/hdb

Unfortunately this also results in lilo hanging as follows:

LIL

I would appreciate any help in order to get my linux system booted again :)

My setup is as follows:
/dev/hda - used for Windows XP (Windows actually also fails to boot)
/dev/hdb Ubuntu, with /root and /home dirs via LVM,
/boot on /dev/hdb1 (ext3)

I used to chainload grub via the XP bootloader.

Thanks,
Olaf
.

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