I have had Debian Etch on my machine for well over a year and working great. The other day when I was booting up I had a power outage as the machine was still booting up. When the power came back on and I tried to boot my machine it went along as it always does but instead of going to my desktop after the boot sequence I get one beep and the screen goes blank.
I can do a Cntrl Alt F4 and bring up a login prompt login and all that but if I run startx I get an error message that it is already running and says there is a file called .X0-lock in tmp. Did some searching on the web and saw folks had luck removing that file so I did a rm /tmp/ .X0-lock to delete the file. The file was deleted but when I did a reboot and ran startx again, I got the same results.

I'm at a loss on this and sure hope some folks can help me out.

Thanks

If you remove that file and you "startx", does it work?

That file usually means that Xorg is running, it's just a lock file to prevent starting a session that's been already started.

In a power outage that file will remain there for the next time you log in, which creates that problem. Removing it should fix that, and it's so strange that the file is remaining there after you delete it, unless your file system was damaged by the power outage.

Even if you manage to fix the xorg issue, I would still boot from a livecd and run fsck manually on all the partitions.

I second the thought of running a fsck to ensure no damage was done to your drive. I actually had that happen once, and it did screw up my drive. Although it was still readable so I could get my data from it still, with the help of Phlak. Anyways, that is my recommendation. Otherwise you might have to go as far as reinstalling X if you can't it to work. And hope that it only screwed up that one part.

DragonM15

Well fsck did not find any issues, and after removing the .X0-lock file this is what I get after running startx.


server is already active for display 0
if this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again

I remove it as root and still the same issue, any other ideas on what to try.

Thanks

does X start by default? aka... you boot up and you get a gui login screen? If so you might have to go down to runlevel 3 which is the multiuser console login and try from there. I know on my slackware the configuration file is in /etc/inittab .. Not sure about yours.

Another though, have you tried starting X as root, or another user in general? Are you sure .XO-lock is being removed. have you tried rm -f .X0-lock? Also, have you tried removing .Xauthority from your users home directory? It might be related... I have had problems with that file before if X crashed for some random reason. Might help might not, just some things to try.

DragonM15

When you use lilo as your boot loader, I don't know about grub, to get into a run level other then the default just append the level to the kernel you want to boot. for example if vmlinux is the name you associated with the kernel you want to boot just input vmlinux 3. This will boot you into vmlinux at run level 3. You could also try telinit 3 to get to run level 3 after you have booted.

I would also make sure that it is being deleted, don't assume. And you might consider deleting that file while running under a live CD.