[Nottingham] Big biiig problem regarding IDE-RAID

[Alex Herington]

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone has any ideas on this. We have a server at work
running Debian 3.0 Linux. The motherboard has the Promise PDC27262 IDE RAID
chipset (I think). I had to do some funky kernel tweaking to get the server to
boot from the RAID1 array: I installed the Debian system on a normal IDE
channel (/dev/hda), then compiled a kernel with support for the RAID chipset,
installed the kernel, updated /etc/fstab to replace /dev/hda with the
appropriate /dev/ataraid entries then switched off, moved the HDD to the first
RAID channel, added another HDD then cloned (using the Promise BIOS), et
voila.

It sounds sketchy, but the problem is both harddisks developed bad sectors
today. Grr. I rebooted and did the fsck dance, then rebooted again to find the
server won't boot past MySQL loading. By this point nothing useful like SSHd
has loaded, and I can't get to a shell to fix anything (like stop MySQL
running at boot).

I didn't make a rescue disk (..I know) and the normal Debian install/rescue CD
doesn't support the Promise chipset. The bootloader is LILO. Is there anything
I can do to 'get back in' to edit files?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Alex 'stressed!' Herington.