I’ll admit it up front: I’m a moron.
Before leaving for work, I did an emerge system. I SSH’d in this afternoon to configure and make the kernel and do the other random stuff that must be done before the install is final. For the record, I chose metalog as my system logger and vcron as my cron package. Metalog looked a little more robust and higher performance than my other options. I chose vcron cause the docs told me to.
I chose GRUB, just because I have not had issues with GRUB and LILO and I have had issues in the past. (I managed to trash the family Pentium 60 a few times thanks to my ignorance and LILO. I was in middle school at the time, so cut me some slack.)
Everything is ready to rock, so I unmounted everything and rebooted. The machine didn’t come back up on the network. I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out which part of the install went wrong, what I could have done wrong or set incorrectly.
Then it hit me: There’s a boot CD in the CD-ROM drive and the BIOS is set to boot from CD first. *SMACK* I (hopefully!) have a functional system on that hard drive, I just can’t get to it.
Someone really needs to come up with a remote remove CD from CD-ROM over SSH protocol.