partition table blown away!

[Rick Bragg]

Hi,

I have installed ubuntu 8.10 64 bit desktop on my system and all of a
sudden after many perfect reboots, my partition table was wiped and set
to linux raid.

Here was the events as they happened.

Only one hard sata drive and one sata dvd drive plugged into system
board.

Installed system onto the sata hard drive. and that went fine.

rebooted with new sata hard drive that was fine.

rebooted with 4 new sata hard drives, that went fine.

installed mdadm, that also installed a new kernel (server). then I
formatted the 4 new drives as raid, ran mdadm and created the array with
the 4 new disks, then ran cfdisk to create a file system on the
new /dev/md0 array, then mounted that file system that all went fine.

rebooted with new kernel (server) and system would not boot with new
kernel. It could not find the root.

Anyway, I then rebooted selecting from the grub list the old (generic)
kernel, that went fine.

OK, So far, I can reboot with the old (generic) kernel perfectly, but
every time I try to select the new (server) kernel, it can't find the
root.  Only the original (generic) kernel works.

OK great, I am rebooting from my sata (non raid) hard drive many times
over and over and things are going fine. 

Then later, I try again to boot with the (server) kernel, and it can't
fine the root again.  No surprise.  So I reboot, and all of a sudden, no
grub menu!  I then boot into the CD, and mount all my drives (5) and
they are ALL now partitioned as raid!!!  

Somehow, simply selecting that (server) kernel from the grub list as i
did many times before, this time blew away my partition table on my
first disk!  

Any clues?

Rick




-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by Green Mountain Network, and is
believed to be clean.