I’ve been away from here for a while, having been forced by work issue to move to an iMac for most of my work, so my openSUSE usage has been primarily on the side. However, I finally got a new home office server, and I’m trying to setup it up with RAID and openSUSE. The system is a Dell Optiplex 755 SMT, with two Samsung SATA drives (2TB each).
I followed the instructions here: Implementing Software Raid on openSUSE 11.2 | Spirit of Change
Basically, I setup both drives with /boot, swap, and / partitions, formatted with the RAID auto-detect FS, then created the RAID partitions over the three pairs of physical partitions.
However, apparently, I forgot to tell the bootloader to install to /boot. At any rate, it booted in the standard pre-config reboot, and aborted the boot complaining about filesystem corruption and asking me to check the filesystem with fsck manually. But the little monitor I was using didn’t allow me to see what partition it was complaining about. So I gave up and rebooted, thinking I’d reinstall or try something else.
That’s where the real trouble started. Now when I boot the machine, I get to the BIOS startup screen (big Dell logo), and then the screen goes black with two lines:
“Initializing Intel(R) Boot Agent GE v1.2.50
PXE 2.1 Build 086 (WfM 2.0)”
Then it hangs. I’ve tried hitting F2 (setup) and F12 (boot menu) during the BIOS startup, but the result is always the same, it boots to the above message, and hangs.
Is there anything I can do about this? I can’t get the machine to boot to setup or a CD. What do I do now?