Re: The sad demise of an etch.

[hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]

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.

-- hendrik