I have managed to damage linux (again) I wish I could relate what I had done that caused the problem, but unfortunately, I just do not know.

When squeeze/sid is booted it gets as far as the signon panel then becomes totally non-responsive. Except that ALT+SYSREQ+R makes it possible to enter CTL+ALT+F1 to get a command prompt - which is useable. (but does not cause any other entries or key strokes to respond).

Any guidance in finding and fixing the cause of the problem would be greatly appreciated.

Gary

try running top, see what's hogging power and kill it.

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Unfortunately, <TOP> does not reveal the problem.
Thank you for the effort


Gary

okay, particularly, a hardware lockup could also do it.
be very specific: is the cpu at 100%? Is the disk going regularly?

Take off anything you don't need and try a boot. Also, boot from an install cdrom.

The motherboard has a dual core processor ---- neither one ran more the 35% -- not continually, but what I would expect cpu activity to look like. Some other things I discovered: If I boot to the recovery session, I can log in as 'user' and issue a startx, and I will have my desktop displayed.

It looks like it gets hung up displaying the signon screen an before letting me input the user/password.

I appreciate your suggestions and comments -- And I plan to try the suggestions you made; But --- I thing I am going put that aside while I work on getting the current stable version of squeeze installed.

OK. Graphics is where we are getting stuck.
lets have your video card (lspci line) and the output of

grep driver /var/log/Xorg.0.log

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