I worry that my computer may be dead.

I did the following:
su
hostname turbo

I got this crazy idea that I should name all of my computers after American Gladiators, so I looked up the hostname program, read the man file on it briefly, and then simply did it.

Next thing I knew, nothing was working. My computer was dead.

I tried resetting, and now it won't even boot. Grub gives me a message regarding tab completion and then this:

GRUB>

Seeing no help from Grub, I've begun downloading and creating a rescue CD which I'm pretty sure is not going to be the answer.

Does anybody know the answer to this problem?

For what it's worth, I'm running Fedora Core 5 (FC5) on a computer running RAID striping on the main drive. I worry that mounting one of the drives with the rescue CD, or knoppix and changing it there might cause bigger problems down the line because of the RAID...

Apologies if you read this on FedoraForums...that site went down, hence the crosspost...

HELP!

If you can boot from installation media and do some repair work, change the hostname back to whatever it was before you changed it! That should be enough to make it bootable again.

Then do some serious research via www.google.com/linux on what all you need to do to change the hostname without trashing the system. It's more complicated than just "hostname <something>".

Start with this: http://www.cpqlinux.com/hostname.html

In FC5, look in /etc/sysconfig/network. I suspect you need a fully qualified name, but not sure.

If you boot in the FC5 CD in "linux rescue" mode...
If it detects the raid, and you are able to see in the console when it is detect devices and it is able to mount it at /mnt/sysimage, then you can try using grub-install to fix the boot problem after you do chroot /mnt/sysimage ...

ie. "grub-install --recheck /dev/md0 ( if /dev/md0 is the raid set device ) If it does not see /dev/md0, you should consider seeing what's wrong with your raid set first, ie. via mdadm --examine /dev/sda1.. if you used mdadm to create the raid or lvm commands..

I've never heard or seen changing hostname crashes the system.
and /etc/sysconfig/network ( HOSTNAME=<name> ), does not need to be fully qualified

Yeah, this is quite strange. I managed to get the computer booted again by running configfile (hd0,0)/grub/grub.conf, and then resetting it as the default boot method, but all is not quite well yet.

The computer is now doing two strange things. The first, it is having trouble setting the hostname when booting. It takes forever and then eventually works. I've gone through checking these:

uname -n
hostname -a
hostname -s
hostname -d
hostname -f
hostname

All of those commands come up normal. I've tried checking all the networking files and all the other files I could find that might have the hostname field in them (including the ones below). All to no avail at getting the hangup at boot to go away.

The other thing that's now happening is that the computer seems to go idle and then die. If I walk away from it for an extended period of time, first it plays the screensaver, then it seems to die somehow. It's confusing. The hard drives are still spinning (I can hear them), and pressing ctrl+alt+F1, is the only thing that seems to do anything. Only get this: when I try to log in in one of those new terminals, after I put in my username, nothing happens. It seems to freeze, and the only thing I can get it to do is reset manually. No password prompt, nothing.

I'm going to try doing a CTRL+ALT+F1 right now while the computer is running to see if it works. I'll report back in a moment if it does, in a few moments if not!

Ok, though CTRL+ALT+F1 does not work after an extended period of time away from the computer, it DOES work when the computer is up and running.

Could this be a hibernation thing I don't understand?