[PLUG] Box won't boot after RAID drive swap

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

Hi all,

Last week I emailed the list because I got an alert that one of the
drives in my RAID1 array was in danger of failing. Thanks to everyone
who replied in that thread!

I ordered some new drives, and this morning I attempted to install a
new drive. It didn't go well.

There didn't seem to be any easy way to add this drive as a third
drive (I didn't see where I'd plug it in on my motherboard) so I
decided to remove the old drive and replace it with the new one. This
is where my problems started. I think I must have been using device
names instead of UUIDs in the RAID. The boot process got stuck trying
to connect to a nonexistent /dev/sde drive.

Things I've tried:
* Booting into recovery mode
* Unplugging the new drive
* Putting the old drive back

None of these worked. I'm at a point now where the workstation is
spontaneously powering off in the middle of the boot process.
Sometimes it's on the BIOS screen, sometimes it gets a little
further. Needless to say this makes figuring out what's wrong quite
difficult.

My best guess is that in opening up the case for the first time in 6
years and removing the drive from a tight space, I loosened something
else important, but if that's the case I can't find it.

I'm feeling pretty stuck now.  All I can think to do now is to try to
boot off a flash drive, but I'm not even sure that will work since I'm
having trouble even getting past the BIOS screen now.

I'm wondering if anyone else has ever run into something like this. If
so, do you have any advice on what else I might check?

Thanks.

Walt
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