To make things worse, after moving the server four years ago and rebooting, I decided to delete some unused partitions and rededicate them to LVM for the Sarge install. No problem. Fast forward to four years later, after we had that power failure, the server wouldn't boot. Errors from the boot loader (a weird one I had decided to try way-back-when, named "XOSL", so I didn't recognize things right away, since now I use GRUB exclusively and am tuned in to that). Turns out when reappropriating those "unused" partitions (cough, cough), I wiped out the XOSL bootloader files. But I didn't find that out for four more years on the next reboot attempt! After an initial panic attack, I calmed down and said, hey, this is just a bootloader error. Easy enough to fix. And it was, after I thought my way through things after asking a few questions here. Put GRUB on the box and was good to go.