I have a Centos 5 installation that I did with a PCIe video card. Now that the install in complete, I'd like to convert the system to headless. I have modified the menu.lst file so that the serial port is the console and I've made sure that a getty is running on the serail port after boot.

However, if I remove the video card, the system never boots. Of course, I cannot tell what it is doing but it never gets to the point where grub outputs on the console.

The only hint I have is that if I put the original video card back in, it works fine. If I put another, different video card in, it won't boot. This second card has a different video chipset so that may be an issue.

Does anyone have any idea what the proper procedure is for beheading a linux system?

Thanks,
Marc

Well if you haven't specified the run level to boot into, then removing the card will leave X with nowhere to go. Edit /etc/inittab and change the default run level to 3.