I have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 that is configured to have 5 SATA drives in a RAID5 software configuration. The problem is one of the drives failed and then when I simply replaced the drive and bounced the machine, it booted up into a Grub Rescue prompt. I have no idea what to do in this case. The system was built on Debian Linux and used mdadm to manage disks in the software RAID array. Why one disk failure caused my entire server to crash or wipe out the MBR is beyond me.

I don't know if this makes any bit of difference but the Dell SATA controller on the 2950 server is somehow tied to the PERC RAID controller. So in order to present any drives to the Debian Linux O.S., you would first have to create a single virtual disk per actual physical disk on the PERC RAID configuration. Then it will present those virtual disks to the O.S. as actual physical disks like they are. I guess they just assume you would use hardware RAID regardless.

Does anyone know how I can resolve or get my system back up and running? It's Debian 6 on a 64-bit platform. I just need to know how I can get past the Grub Rescue mode and boot back into my file system.

Hi:

I'm not the expert but I am going to do my best to help you-

Apparently in Grub Rescue Mode it is locked so we need to find a way to unlock it-
This was the case for this member at Ubuntu-
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1742150

Acknowledged; that's going to be my focus over the course of the day or next few days to help.
There has to be a way to get around it-

When I was stuck in Grub Rescue in the past I put the Live Debian CD back in my tower and re-installed Debian.
That may seems absurd but it was all I had to go on 6 months ago-

<Solved>grub rescue (think) this might do it-
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=76113

Hope this helps-

Found another way:

How to fix GRUB rescue prompt without Live CD?
http://karuppuswamy.com/wordpress/20...-cd-for-grub2/