No Boot Device
 

Running RH 8 on a dell server.

I have no idea what happened. I was just running the updates from the up2date service. I reboot as it tells me to. And now, I get a No Boot Device error [hit F1 to resume, or F2 to setup]

F1 does nothing. F2 takes me to a setup screen I don't understand.

What does this mean? did I just wipe out my system????? Is this OS related or hardware?

What are the steps to go about fixing this (if possible) or do I have to reinstall??

thanks for any help, and if it looks hopeless please let me know !!

extreme newbie.... please help!

Just to clarify this machine is barely a year old. I've ran the up2date service tons of times.

Could it actually have done something that would overwrite the bootable partition? Or cause the hard drive to not be recognized?

thanks again!

For sure the bootloader has been corrupted.

Did you create a boot floppy? Use that to boot RH and run grub-install.
No? Then boot the 1st CD to recovery mode. Your root partition should be mounted at /mnt/sysimage. Try the command.
chroot /mnt/sysimage
grub-install

Thanks, I'll give that a try... once I find by boot disk.

still nothing
 

I put in my RH8 disk 1, went into rescue mode. goes through the rigamarole.
Finds my hard drive and then says there is no Linux partition. Bumps me out to a shell and says to reboot.
No fix.

Am I screwed?!
Do I need to reinstall?
:scratch:

bump

Might be a hard drive problem. Does the motherboard BIOS detect the hard drive? Do you hear the drive spinning or making any noise on powerup?

The setup screen you get by pressing F2 is the motherboard BIOS configuration utility. BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System and in a nutshell is the software (Its really called firmware) glue between the operating system and the hardware. I'm only vaguely familar with the BIOS on a Dell. The first screen is usually a menu page or standard configuration page for setting the time and hard drive settings.

Does the computer manual have any information on the configuring the BIOS?