OK, I have made some progress. There was an ATI Rage 128 video card in the system, and the the newer Debians do not have the radeon drivers. I am making that assumption, as I had the same issue with my laptop and had to compile the radeon drivers when I updated a year ago to testing. 

I removed the card, and now I get output from the video card on the motherboard...yeah! I don't need the card in the current configuration as a headless server.

However, the system hangs when trying to start network services. I rebooted into rescue mode and these are the last few messages:

Configuring network interfaces...[  10.181311] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): etho: link not ready
[10.184481] e1000: etho NIC Link is UP 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX
[10.187930] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): ehto: link becomes ready

Then nothing is printed out and the system does not respond. I cannot get to a 

The card is the internal NIC - I don't have any extra cards in the machine. The computer is an old Dell Optiplex GX260.

Thanks for any ideas you may have on how to get the machine back online!

Mark


On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Mike Ballon <mike.ballon@gmail.com> wrote:
If you cannot get output to the monitor "at all", a live CD will do you no good.


On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:
I tried all sorts of F keys, and no response on the monitor. I am wondering if there is something wrong with the driver. I had this problem on a different machine, and I had to download, compile, and install a new radeon driver. I can take the machine apart and see what the video card is and see if that is a problem. Is there a way to fix a driver problem with a live cd?

Mark


On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 8:34 AM, Carruth, Rusty <Rusty.Carruth@smartstoragesys.com> wrote:

If you hit control-alt-F1 (or F2 or … all the way to F6) do you see anything?

 

What happens on the monitor while you boot?

 

I’ve seen cases (personally) where an install decides the monitor can do more than it can (and I think I had an upgrade do that once also), leaving you with a dead monitor.

 

However, given that you cannot ssh into it I’ll bet that won’t be the case - but hopefully you can see something on the monitor as it boots…

 

Rusty

 

From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Mark Phillips
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 8:21 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Upgrade to Debian testing hosed my system

 

Mike,

 

Unfortunately, there is still no signal after a hard reboot. If there were, then I would do what you suggest. 

 

Any ideas on how I can determine what is wrong by using something like a knoppix cd?

 

Mark

 

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Mike Ballon <mike.ballon@gmail.com> wrote:

If there is no signal to the monitor with the box "up" I would reboot it.

 

From there you'll need to figure out if the boot loader is intact or not. If it is you can boot into single user mode and try to figure out what's going on with the box. If you do not get the boot loader now we're talking about a repair to either the loader or the system as a whole using a disc or memory stick.

 

 

 

 

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 8:28 AM, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:

 

I used aptitude to upgrade a headless server from Debian stable to Debian testing. The upgrade did not generate any error messages, but when I rebooted I could not ssh into the box (connection refused) nor do I get any output on a monitor I attached to the box (no signal). Apache does not appear to be running either on the box (could not connect to the box). I can successfully ping the box.

 

Any suggestions on how to fix this this server would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks,

 

Mark 

 

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