After having made use of a remote power switch, my server did not come back online. When I went to the datacenter and reboot the computer on the spot I see the server booting (I see the centos progress bar with running almost all the way to the end) and eventually giving the following messages:

md/raid:md2: cannot start dirty degraded array.
md/raid:md2: failed to run raid set.
md: pers->run() failed ...
md/raid:md2: cannot start dirty degraded array.
md/raid:md2: failed to run raid set.
md: pers->run() failed ...



Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
Pid: 1, comm: init not tainted 2.6.32-279.1.1.el6.i686 #1
Call Trace:
 [<c083bfbc>] ? panic+0x68/0x11c
 [<c045a501>] ? do_exit+0x741/0x750
 [<c045a54c>] ? do_group_exit+0x3c/0xa0
 [<c045a5c1>] ? sys_exit_group+0x11/0x20
 [<c083eba4>] ? syscall_call+0x7/0xb
 [<c083007b>] ? cmos_wake_setup+0x62/0x112

The server runs CentOS and has software raid, and I don't have backups of the raid settings. The only backup I have is of /home and the database dumps. (Glad to at least have those though.)

Since the server is an old Dell PowerEdge 1750 with no CD-ROM drive, I have no way of booting the machine from a boot disk. I also remember in the past that the server also wouldn't boot from a bootable USB disk. So the only way I know how to boot the server is to go to the datacenter, pick up the server and take it to the office. Screw open the server. Attach a cdrom drive to an IDE slot on the motherboard. And then boot it. I am hoping you guys could help me avoid this.

I have looked a bit through the boot options and I found the following boot options. When CentOS is about to boot and interrupt the boot-countdown:

CentOS (2.6.32-279.1.1.el63.i686)
CentOS Linux (2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.i686)
centos (2.6.32-71.el6.i686)

I think the first configuration is the default one, because choosing that gets me to the above mentioned kernel panic. The other ones end with something like "Sleeping forever".

I can press 'e' to edit boot commands, press 'a' to modify kernel arguments and press 'c' for grub command line.

The command line gives a grub> prompt. But I have no idea how to get the system to boot without (trying to) access the dirty partitions.

What I want to do is off course: - boot the machine - check hard drive for errors - mark the drive as clean