Sort posts in sidebar by cat

I have 2 blogs, one is a network status blog and the other one was hacked up to work as an equipment data repository. The equipment page was set up to show posts in the main section in alphabetical order.

On the network status blog I successfully added a “recent posts” list to the sidebar.

On the equipment page I copied the recent posts from the network status page and altered it to show the equipment posts based on the category they’re in. Unfortunately, when you select a category it only shows the last entry for that category in the sidebar. What I need is for it to show all the posts for a given category.

I’m not to familiar with PHP so a lot of my work was copy/paste trial and error.

Here’s what I have on the equipment page sidebar

<h2><?php _e('Towers'); ?></h2>
<ul>
     <li>
          <div id="post- <?php the_ID(); ?>">
               <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark">
                    <?php the_title(); ?>
               </a>
          </div>
     </li>
</ul>

Can anyone tell me what I’m doing wrong?

I would like provide a link to the page, but it contains sensitive information so I can’t.