Thank you for your reply. I chose to boot from the hard drive, but haven’t replaced the CMOS battery. Are you saying that this computer might have a RAID configuration? Could the power outage have caused the device to lose its configuration? If we reconfigure it, is there a chance the OS could be restored?

Its your server... you should know it better as others ;)   It might be possible that the boot config is lost or that a phys. problem exist or a broken boot sector. The later one often produce a blank screen with a white cursor.

So what HBA is used and are the phyical disks are shown the server management?

Regards,
Joerg

Sigh, I’m a software person, and I ended up taking over this just as the typhoon hit. Should I check the HBA in the inventory records? I can see that two Toshiba hard drives are showing up, and when I ran a device check, both hard drives passed the inspection.

I have a really basic question—would it be possible to remove the hard drives and directly copy the data from them in this situation? The previous backup missed some important information.

If you see 2 disks this is a good sign.

From the manual.... the following HBA options exists.

Internal controllers:
PERC S110 (SW RAID)
PERC H310
PERC H710
PERC H710P

The "H" options are all Hardware based RAID cards.  A server with 2 physical disks most likely use RAID1 config like option to protect against a single drive failure.

Regards,
Joerg

Hi,

It does seem like the BIOS cannot retain the configuration. Also, you may need to confirm the previous server configuration if it has RAID configured. If it does have RAID, please check in BIOS if the SATA settings are set to RAID. This usually happens when there is a power outage and the CMOS batter is not able to retain the BIOS settings, hence the BIOS is set back to default. 

Thank you for your response. I'm not sure if RAID was ever configured. In my situation, if I switch from AHCI to RAID in SATA, would that cause the operating system to be lost?