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Re: The sad demise of an etch.



On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 11:18:40AM -0400, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com 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@topoi.pooq.com 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? 

A

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