On reboot it gets past grub and then kernel panics with the following error:

acpi aborted because no cpio magic

Anyone ever seen this error before? I never have. I’m hoping the hardware isn’t borked in some way.

I’ve got memtest running on it now, and after that runs for a while I’ll try booting in single-user mode.

Thanks to Bazaar and my paranoid habit of pushing copies of my article repos out to different machines I haven’t lost any of the work on my current article projects (one is due Monday), but it’s still annoying that it happened.

And here I was feeling pretty good about the Shuttle and how reliable it had been . . .

UPDATE: The memory doesn’t appear to be bad, nor does the hard drive.

It looks like the kernel is the problem. When I select 2.6.27-11 from the grub menu, I get the error. When I select 2.6.27-9, the system boots just fine. I’ll reinstall the 2.6.27-11 kernel and see if the problem goes away. This is weird.

UPDATE 2: Well, one sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-2.6.27-11-generic and a reboot later and I am back running on 2.6.27-11. I still don’t know why it happened, but I can envision it as a B-movie at the local drive-in: “When Good Kernels Go Bad!”. I’ll update again if I find out.