My super-cheep China-made PC clone running FC5 died last weekend after a 
power failure and the disc drive was off for a day or two. It never 
recovered. When I powered up on Monday, the CPU fan would switch on 
normally and that's all it  would do. No boot, didn't even get to grub. 
Everybody in the office here told me that it was the motherboard. Well I 
have backups and it wasn't a front-line machine anyway, but I still 
would rather get the old disk running than dig out the archives because 
my backups are not up to the minute.

So I had another old machine that worked and I removed its drives and 
stuck this other machine's drive in its place and tried to boot it. What 
I got was basically no drive info found. It couldn't find VolGroup01 and 
then it couldn't find other system files it was looking for and it froze 
at switchroot failed to mount...
The setup menu can see the disk though. Could it be a conflict in what 
was in CMOS memory, or something like that? Does one not "just swap 
drives" on linux machines like that?


So I replaced the orignial drives, booted, and everything came up roses. 
I changed the initial runlevel to 1 for some reason I've forgotten now 
and tried to reboot. Now I got the exact same thing as with the other 
machine's drive. It can't find anything and stops at switchroot 
failed... These disks were running FC9.

What's the logical procedure for diagnosing this sort of thing?  
(besides scrapping the machines?) Do I now have two dead machines and 
three wiped disks? I did some Googling, but I didn't know exactly what I 
was looking for so that wasn't very productive. If someone could point 
me in the right direction, or can tell me what to do, I'd appreciate it.

TIA,
- Bill Thoen
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