Tonight my IBM xSeries 445 Server crashed and doesn't boot up anymore, giving me the message "invalid partition table". There aren't any other error msg displayed, nor diagnostic leds, nor error logs. There are 2 drives installed, one contains the OS and the other a standalone partition. The LSI Logic controller detects the 2 drives during post, but what's strange is that the drive 2 (with no OS) is marked as boot, and info about CYL/HD/SEC are showed, while for the system disk no info about it are showed. Well, this matter is probably because, a couple of days ago, i erroneously extracted the 2 drives while the system was running :|. However when I reinserted the disks everything continued functioning normally. Any help is welcome. GaB

This generally means at boot up your system tried to determine what volume to use to boot up as the operating system and found corrupt and\or invalid data. This can occur if you have somehow set more than one partition as the main or "active" partition. Its also possible that your main partition has become damaged. Do you have more than one Operating system? Do you have any type of software that reconfigures your boot up procedure? If those two question do not apply..then your only hope is to try a reformat and hope the disk istelf isnt damaged... Good Luck.. :-\ VeL

(while for the system disk no info about it are showed.) go to hdd manufacture website, download and run their test utitility. post back once that is done and can go from there.

A boot floppy with MBRWORK (free) can rebuild the partition table, assuming you didn't fry the drive/controller electronics. Best

Thank you for the replies, and sorry for not having posted but I've been in a great mess this week... It's been a drive fault,unfortunately, so I had to change the disk and restore from a backup.