My MATE server took an unfortunate nosedive yesterday. It had been acting wonky for the past week or so, that I decided to just reboot it. Sadly, when it started to come up, I received the message, "no boot drive found" when it reached the UEFI portion of the startup. "Ubuntu unavailable' was the next report I saw. Checking the startup configuration and entering PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controller) and found that two of my six drives were in a FAILED state. Since I had only gone cheap and stupid, I was using RAID 0, which means my only options are to replace the drives, re-install the OS, and lose all my data. I no longer need the server for work-related tasks, so I think I'm just going to consign it to the junk heap.
I still have a laptop running Ubuntu MATE, so I'm not completely out of the pool yet, but I don't see a great future in tinkering with it anymore. Too bad. It was fun while it lasted.
Maybe I'll pop in from time to time with questions about my laptop, but for all intents and purposes, I'm gone now. You folks have been absolutely stellar and I wish you well.
