Last Friday the server was dead. I didn’t notice until Thunderbird began complaining that the server could not be reached. It is right under my desk, and it was still “running” so I switched on the monitor. Nothing. I tried to login remotely: nothing. So I did a hard reset. That worked. Up until the booting proces started, since that showed me the message “Error loading operating system”. Fortunately, the bootsector is on disk A, the bootdisk is B and the datadisk is C. Starting a live-CD and creating a bootsector on disk B should do the trick.
Just to be sure (perhaps more than one disk was broken and I needed to reinstall the OS) I downloaded the latest Ubuntu ISO and burnt it on CD. I restarted the server, and quick enough found out that only the disk with the bootsector had died. That disc was a reminiscent from the old Windows installation that died (could not start Windows because of a corrupt registry or whatever) some time ago.
What I did was: delete the disk from the devices list (/boot/grub/devices.map), modify grub’s menu.lst (/boot/grub/menu.lst) to use the correct devices (hd1 was hd0 now), ran grub-install and rebooted the system. Voila. Everything was back in working order.
I realized in the process that certain parts of the bootdisk are never backupped. Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?