partition just vanished

[nashvillek5]

New guy here and fairly new to linux:

Redhat Ent 5.5 fresh install (sinble boot setup)been working fine for a week. We rebooted and it comes up in grub mode. We rebooted to install disk in rescue mode and it says no partions found. What could be causing this? No one is going in and deleting anything. How could the patitions vanish and still have the system running fine. I am not familiar with grub what so ever minus what I have read trying to figure out this problem. We had Dell run a full hardware diagnostic and the server passed every test.

[Irithori]

I can think of four possibilities:

1) Faulty hardware.
Not to be mean, but the diag32 tool, that dell requires you to run before they (willingly) offer support consists imho of:
sleep(30min)
echo "Everything ok"

2) Someone misconfigured the raidcontoller

3) Someone deleted/messed with the system partition(s)

4) Someone misconfigured grub


Please check your raids, once you have the chance in BIOS bootup.

Then, can you boot from a liveCD once more and paste the output of the following:

fdisk -l
dmesg

[nashvillek5]

Is there anything I can install to monitor this or any other things I can review or look at while the system is in use? The server is in production at this time.

[Irithori]

fdisk -l and dmesg are safe to use while the server is production.

But I dont understand:
Does the server boot or is it stuck in grub?

[nashvillek5]

ok, here is the deal.. We installed core OS and the packages needed, configured everything and rebooted several times to make sure everything was solid and it was. Ok so then we installed the Progress database and moved all of our data over to it and setup some samba shares, setup FTP access and the printers and the fax service. As things all seemed to be fine. Now when we reboot, right after the BIOS post it goes straight into grub>

The software vendor's hardware/software support was unable to get the OS to load. So we re-installed the OS and got everything working again. Then again a week later, to install the serial card it would not boot past the grub> so again we reinstalled the OS and here we are with a perfectly working server that I am unsure if I can restart or not without having to re-install the OS everytime I have to reboot.