Hello.

I have installed Debian (debian-9.0.0-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso) with xfce and "Debian desktop environment" on thin client with ide hdd connected. Installation was completed successfully but when I rebooted only blank screen with blinking cursor appeared after GRUB screen. I used USB flash drive that I created with Rufus in Windows 7.

I am able to boot in recovery mode from GRUB. And when I navigate to
/etc/x11/xorg.conf
I find out that this file is empty.

After that I tried to boot in live regime using distros with different environments:
debian-live-9.0.0-i386-xfce.iso
debian-live-9.0.0-i386-lxde.iso
debian-live-9.0.0-i386-gnome.iso
but result was the same, blank screen with blinking cursor.

Does it mean this is a video card driver problem?

Hardware:
Liscon thin client
Motherboard: M7CN896IDK
Onboard VIA C7 1GHz Processor
Build on VIA CN896 and VT8237A
One 512mb DIMM
VIA VT6122 GbE and Realtek ALC662 HD Audio
+ I connected 4Gb IDE HDD to it.

So far I was able to boot with desktop environment only from USB in live regime with Tiny Core Linux, Puppy Linux, Manjaro and Vector Linux.
Also few days ago I successfully installed on HDD
debian-8.8.0-i386-CD-1.iso
without desktop environment and booted it to command line.

What approximate order of actions should I take to solve this problem?
Any ideas will be very much appreciated.

Finally I did it.
I tried debian-live-8.8.0-i386-xfce-desktop.iso and it was able to boot in live regime with desktop environment.
I installed it on HDD and it works!

As this thread is already marked as "Solved," would you please share the solution? It might help someone else.

I'm experiencing this exact same problem with Debian 9.1 LXDE. (Haven't checked any other ones yet.) I've been searching the web high and low for the last few hours and this is literally the only piece of information I've come across regarding this exact issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated? For instance, if worst comes to worst, where can I download that particular version of Debian??

Never mind. I got it to work by downloading the specific ISO for LXDE instead of the ISO with all the different GUIs bundled. Saaweeeeeet babeh jesus

Apparently, the fundamental problem is that practically no one uses the Debian Live CDs until they are released on Stable. As such, various bugs were never caught until AFTER the official release.

The reliable thing is to NOT use the Debian Live CDs at all. Just use the standard netinst installer to do a standard install onto a USB thumbdrive. Or, if you do use the Debian Live CDs, expect to be a guinea pig.

Actually, the reason it wasn't working was because I was selecting 'No' to install Grub on the master boot drive, even though I was still installing it on the same drive. I was scared because I bricked an old laptop way back due to something with Grub when trying to install Arch.

If you're paranoid about this sort of thing, then you can get a small USB thumbdrive and install GRUB onto that (perhaps even with /boot on it). I did that with a Mac Mini because I didn't want to overwrite the stock Mac bootloader. Thus, if I ever want to restore the Mac Mini to OSX only, I just delete the Debian ext4 partition and expand the OSX partition to take up the full space again.