How to recover failed server

[pillboxhunter]

I had to reboot my server the other day and it now fails to reboot. It stops at a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top left and doesn't respond to anything except the power switch.
I have 4.2Tb of storage in there which is greyholed and has been working fine for some months.
I can boot the computer using a USB stick and puppy linux so I know its working OK.
My plan was to try and copy the fstab which contains all the info about my storage pool and then re-install Amahi. - Can't find it!
There are 8 hard drives in there, 3 in a raid and one partitioned so as to have a small system partition and a large landing zone. They all appear to be working fine.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can recover this lot and not mess up the greyhole pool?
I do not have enough disk space elsewhere to simply copy everything off and start again.

[radioz]

Using the USB boot method, I would first try to figure out what failed to see if it could be fixed.
While using Puppy, mount the os drive (/dev/sda?) and take a look in the log files in /var/log. Particularly /var/log/messages. Start at the bottom of the file and work backwards looking for error messages.

What is your drive configration?

Does Puppy have a way of examining drive SMART data? Its possible you have a drive failure. The Smart data might tell you that.

[pillboxhunter]

Fell into the old trap!
The boot order of the Hard drives had changed itself round and it was trying to boot from the wrong drive! Not sure why that happens but it does.
Changed it back and it's running fine.

[bigfoot65]

I have had that happen before as well. Not sure how it happens, but once its set back things work fine.