Here's my system:

Supermicro X5DAE motherboard with 2 Xeon processors, 6GB RAM, a SCSI U320 hard drive (/dev/sda), and two IDE hard drives (/dev/hdc and /dev/hdd, with soft RAID 0). The SCSI U320 hard disk is connected via an on-board Adaptec 79xx SCSI adapter.

Here's what happened:

I installed RedHat 8.0 on the system, and it seemed to be working fine. I used the driver for the SCSI adapter downloadable from www.adaptec.com, and installed it using "linux dd" at the initial prompt of the installation process. Everything seemed to be OK: the system reboots fine.

However, a couple days ago, I returned to the machine to find it with only a blank screen and a "_" flashing. Rebooting gives the same result.

Here's what I did to try to diagnose/fix it:

Using the boot floppy made during installation causes a kernel panic during boot; "/bin/insmod exited abnormally".

Using the installation CD, by entering "linux dd rescue", and using the Adaptec driver disk, I can mount all the partitions. There is a "halt" item in / with zero size.

I used "linux dd rescue", did NOT mount the partitions, and then used "fsck.ext3 -p /dev/sdaX" where X=1 is the boot partition and X=3 is /. The partitions came out clean---there didn't appear to be any problem in the first place.

I thought about replacing grub with grub --install /dev/sda, but thought I'd better ask here before I screw up my problem any more than it already is.

Did I do something wrong on the installation to cause this problem? And is there some way to get out of this?