Mr. Huh, meet Mr. Wtf

Good news and bad abound here. Lesee, I've now fiddled with Webigail (our server) that she doesn't boot. She dies trying to load any of the boot images on the disk. I also can't get the machine to boot from CD-ROM (a long standing problem) and when I manage to get it to boot from floppy (it doesn't like to read floppies made on the other machine in the office) it usually can't read from the CD.  Grrrrr....

I'm currently downloading a new set of CD and floppy images to try, in case its some obscure driver problem causing my boot disks to not work, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

The one thing that I HAVE figured out is that my twin raided drives have suddenly become hde and hdf, not hda and hdb as they were when everything was installed. THAT particular mess may have been caused when I rebooted and it claimed the BIOS saved state was corrupted. I had assumed that was the result of the inability to boot, not the cause, but maybe I was wrong.

In any case, I've restored the BIOS to defaults, and I notice the machine now has a hardware raid screen that comes up and talks about the non-existant sata drives. I don't remember that before. (One of the problems with a Linux machine -- its so long between reboots that I don't remember what the normal boot sequence looks like on this box.) Maybe we had the Sata raid controller disabled somehow, but I can't see anything in the BIOS that would control that.  Color me puzzled.

More Updates.

Well, it looks like it WAS the SATA controller that was suddenly enabled that was renumbering my Drives. I've also discovered that not only does CD1 of my install set have known boot issues, it has block errors as well *headdesk*

Still, I've downloaded a copy of the ISO image for CD1 and have discovered that I can boot from CD2 just fine, so some sort of progress is being made...

The Awake.

I'm the awake again. I was working on getting things going on my server this morning, when we lost all internet connectivity due to some problem in Toronto. So, I took that as a sign, and went to bed.

Now that I'm awake again, and thinking clearly, I suspect I know exactly what is wrong with the server, and how to fix it. The only problem is that I have a great deal of difficulty getting the damn machine to boot from either floppy or CD-ROM. I've gotten it to do both, but only about 1 time in 10, so this may take a large amount of frustrating work to get it fixed.