My system went down and I am tring to bring it up. Unfortunatly my old sys administrator is no longer around. I receive a NVRAM error with the original SCSI Adaptor (a Dell Perc2). I have been able to utilize systemrestore CD and can see the partitions.
The originally partions show that the boot partion has a question mark (?) and not the usual astrick (*) in it it is also listed as #a OS/2 Boot Mamag and not the usual #83 Linux.

1) Can I just modify this partion marking it as boot and changing it to a normal linux 83
2) Not sure how to go in and look at the data to know which partiton teh stuff I want to save is at so if you have any advise here also I would appreceiate it.

Aditional Information
Hardware - IBM 7000 M10 with 4 SCSI drives, Dell SCSI Adaptor as well as a built in Adaptec SCSI Adaptor.
Software - Gentoo

I used www.google.com/linux, search phrase "change partition type" in quotes, and found this:
http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermai...ly/008146.html

That gave me an idea: boot from a live cd. It will show you all the partitions it finds. Mount and inspect them one at a time until you find the one with /etc directory. Read the fstab file to see the partition information for the system, the mount points, and the filesystem type.

If the information in the link I gave you is correct, it may be possible to change the partition type without loosing data.