Sidney Brooks wrote:
The situation gets stranger and stranger. For
completeness, I have repeated the problem below. None
of the suggestions helped. Whether I used the boot
floppy or installation CD, I ended up with a blank
screen and frozen computer.
Then, for no sensible reason, I put Debian in the lilo
boot loader on my Mandrake partition. Booting with
lilo, I got into the Debian text mode. I then tried
the dpkg (etc) described below and could not find a
combination that worked.
Then, again for no reason, I attempted to boot from my
boot floppy. This time, I got to the Debian text mode.
Previously, the boot floppy just led to a blank screen
and a frozen computer.
Here is a possible clue. When I tried "startx", I
ended up with:
Fatal Server Error:
no screens found
Unless I've misunderstood something somewhere along the way.For now, forget about X. Just make sure you're not getting frozen in text mode. Once you're confident everything's working properly in text mode, then we can get your X working for you.
So let me understand:1) You booted off a Debian boot floppy, and the machine froze? (This is _after_ you've disabled the automatic startup of any GUI such as xdm or gdm or kdm or wdm or the starting of X in some other manner, right? If any part of X is still trying to start up manually, we're fighting the wrong fire here.)
2) Then you did something with Mandrake. Are you saying this box has a Mandrake partition and a Debian partition? What is your partitioning scheme? Are you sharing any partitions? Which distro has "control" of lilo/grub? Are you using lilo or grub (or something else)?
3) Then booting off the Debian boot floppy results in a working text mode?
If I understand, and you've got both Mandrake and Debian on the same box, it sounds like the changes you made to Mandrake caused lilo to rewrite the boot sector, and those changes "fixed" Debian. So if you boot into Debian and run "lilo", does the problem come back? If so, that's indicative of some sort of problem with Debian's lilo configuration.
-- Kent