Re: No Video

[Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>]

On 11/28/13, erosenberg@hygeiabiomedical.com
<erosenberg@hygeiabiomedical.com> wrote:
> I was having problems with the video on my Linux box; ie no video,
> only terminal after an update.  I am running jessy/sid 32 bit.  The

jessie/testing and sid/unstable are two different versions of Debian.
Do you know which you are using?

> question was whether the hard drive and/or the Intel video chip on the
> board were bad.  A disk test showed no errors,  and a clean boot
> from a live CD showed that the video chip was good.
> The question now is how to heal the system.  A new install,

What happened just before the problem?

Did you do an upgrade from jessie to sid perhaps?

> preserving the /home directory is not an option, since I have a broken
> DOS partition on the hard drive.  An install will remove the DOS
> partition, which has a large amount of critical data.

Have you written down the details of your partitions on paper?
Eg:
fdisk -l /dev/sda

make sure you know which is your DOS partition, which is your "/" or
root partition, which is your home, and swap partitions etc.

Then, if you want, you can do an install of the version of Debian you
want to use, but choose the "advanced" install mode - it's got more
steps in it, but pretty straightforward from my perspective.

Now! Definitely choose "manual" partitioning method, and manually
assign the existing partitions for root "/" partition and swap and
/home partitions (or whichever ones you have on your disk) - you do
not need to have swap, but if you do have a swap partition, you might
as well use it unless you have some extreme security needs (and then
you can configure to encrypt it if you figure it out).

also, save a backup of your existing /etc/ directory, or at least key
files including /etc/fstab

You might find the following command useful (to list the /etc dir in
reverse time sequence, so that the most recently accessed (or updated,
depending on your settings) files/directories are shown last, which
might help you to figure out what ones are important to you to back
up:

ls -lrt /etc

Good luck!
Zenaan