disk crash

[Bill Tangren]

I have a Dell Precision 670 server running RHEL ES 4 with all the updates.
The hard disk seems to have crashed over the weekend. Here is a df output
from last week:


/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      145G   27G  111G  20% /
/dev/sda1              99M   19M   76M  20% /boot

I'm not sure (yet) exactly what kind of hard disk it is, other than it is
a SATA drive. I'm trying to pull the procurement now. The problem is, I
can access the boot partition, but I get a kernel panic error message
after I choose which kernel to boot from. Regardless of which kernel I
choose, this is what comes up:

Decompressing Linux...done.
Booting the kernel.
Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.10 starting
   Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
   Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2
   2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active
   WARNING: can't access (null)
   exec of init ((null)) failed!!!:14
   umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
   Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

When I boot from the rescue CD, I get this message:

You don't have any Linux partitions. Press return to get the shell. The
system will reboot when you exit from the shell.

I can use fdisk to see to scsi partitions, the first, /dev/sda1, being the
boot partition, the latter, /dev/sda2, being the rest of my OS. I can
mount the boot partition and see its contents. I can't mount the other. I
get this error when I try:

mount: Mounting /dev/sda2 on /mnt/hd failed: Invalid argument

If I try to mount the logical volume:

mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/hd

I get a "file not found" error. I looked in the /dev directory on the
rescue disk, and there is no VolGroup* or LogVol* files or directories.

My question, where can I go from here to diagnose the problem?

TIA,
Bill Tangren