Re: The sad demise of an etch.

On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 08:26:20AM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 11:18:40AM -0400, hendrik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 08:03:58AM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 08:52:08AM -0400, hendrik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

But only after you have finished
investigating what is causing the badness in the current install.

If I knew how to do this (besides a few variations on rebooting and
fsck) I wouldn't be considering a reinstall.


I assume that all your efforts so far are producing no results.... Do
you have any older kernels on the etch system that you can try? Maybe
there's a kernel bug that you're hitting (some random combination of
kernel version and hardware). If you can boot an older kernel that
might help. If you don't have one, and want to try, you could chroot
into the system and install an older kernel maybe (from debian
snapshots?). I only suggest this because I had a booting problem after
a kernel upgrade on an older machine (300 mhz celeron). I just went
back to an old kernel and stayed there.

Anyway. I'm concerned that you've got some problem that will come back
after the reinstall. Or maybe, by reinstalling, you'll leapfrog the
problem, I suppose. Regardless, if you can't figure out what the
problem is you may have trouble avoiding it in the future.

Just a hunch, did you change kernel architecture? to the wrong one
accidently perhaps?

I reran lilo on the sarge system.
Rebooted to etch.
It got a lot firther than last time, but after a while reached the black
screen of death.

Rebooted to etch in maintenance mode.
Got to maintenance mode. Didn't know what else to do, do did
dpkg-reconfigure xserger-xorg (or was it xorg-server?)

Accepted all the defaults (probably taken from my old cofig file)

checked the dates on /etc/X11/xorg*

hendrik@lovesong:~$ ls -l /etc/X11/xorg.conf*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3177 2006-09-15 06:32 /etc/X11/xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3079 2006-07-02 12:42 /etc/X11/xorg.conf~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3473 2006-06-07 18:38
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.200606071838
hendrik@lovesong:~$

All old dates, so presumably nothing was actually changed.

rebooted into etch, trying to see what was on the screen immediately
before the black screen of death.
Saw it was starting gdm.
Then the screen went black, and then almost immediately X and gdm
started coming up.

Now mailing this from ssh within a terminal window within icewm within
gdm.

Whatever was wrong? Or is this a fluke? I'll try rebooting again and
see if success is consistent.

well, that's all good news. sounds like lilo got borked there and that
was your problem. THe X problem was surely unrelated, but may have
come from the same upgrade. I have to say, it must be nice to have two
installs on the same machine as it makes diagnosing really easy... I
may look into it: just a minimal install of sarge on a small partition
just so that I have something bootable and usable if I bork my sid
system.

As far as the X problem, who knows. its a finicky thing sometimes,
right?


It survived another reboot. I'll tentatively consider it fixed.

Thanks for all the help.

- hendrik


A



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