serial ports stopped working

[Moriah]

<GRIPE>
Sorry to post something that must certainly have been answered many times before, but the forum search query language is pretty puny, as I can only search for the OR of all the words in the little "Quick Search:" box, and "serial" and "port" come up a lot more often by themselves than "serial port" comes up as a phrase, so it becomes overly tiresome to search the search results
</GRIPE>

Anyway...

I need to use the serial ports on a machine. I rebuilt this machine last month because of a dead disk drive. The serial ports /dev/ttyS0 and /dev/ttyS1 used to work on it, but now the devices are not even in /dev, so minicom gets pretty upset.

What do I need to do to make them work again?

PS This is a painful machine to reboot because of all the stuff that needs to be started up again manually. I expect a kernel build will likely be in order here. If there is a way to do it with loadable modules without a reboot, that would be really great.
_________________
The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.

[geki]

the search function does not like me either. therefore I use google with this search, i.e. for "serial port"