iSeries LPAR Issues

Hello,

I am brand new to this list and am seeking some guidance. We have a System i 520 where I work. It was recently upgraded to V5R4 successfully by another faculty member and a few of his students about two months ago. They also upgraded our HMC to the newest version at the time, although I don't remember what version it was. The reason for this was to hopefully LPAR the machine into one with the i5 OS and the other with some Linux variant. For about a month now they have not been able to get the i5 OS partition to boot, I have no idea what they did to it. They were fiddling around with the LPARs to try to get the machine divided in two which I believe they were able to accomplish. Some time between then and now it broke on them. For some reason they thought it was a hardware problem since no one admitted to doing anything to the system that would have caused it such hurt. They, make sure you're sitting, took it apart and started to pop out whatever batteries and the like they could find to make sure there wasn't any dead whatevers in there. Yes, they had no idea what they were doing, but figured it was a good idea. No, I wasn't there... God knows what other pieces they might have poped out and stuck back in during this process. Now when you boot the machine the time is wrong and the LPAR that was once working and configured correctly is not longer there in the HMC, like removing the batteries lost the settings. I'm not even sure that's on the disks in the iSeries anymore because I can't get into it. It's at the point now where I've tried to help them seeing as I used to deal with the machine quite a bit. We've created a new LPAR and told it to use all the machine's resources. I'm not sure if we pointed it to the correct "boot device", because I've never had to do that before, but it seems like it trys to boot from anywhere it can anyways. It gets to a point where it cycles through about seven codes when trying to start that partition. I remember one being C200 31FF i think, the rest went by too fast or escape me at the moment. I'm not sure if they backed up the system or the HMC after they successfully upgraded it, or if that would even help at this point. I'm looking for suggestions and can offer up whatever other information might help. I understand this is a lot of information on a broad question, but I did the best I could to keep it reasonable...

Thanks,

Kevin