thanks, everyone for their help. I guess the power outage must have messed up the Ethernet connection on the motherboard. i installed an Ethernet card an everything seems to be working fine.
Sorry if I missed it in the thread but what network device is your server directly connected to?
I had an issue where the port blocking for STP was timing out the DHCP request and was assigning the server a 169.X address.
This would likely only be the case if you had a managed switch connected to your server.
Thanks.