I use Sid. I have two partitions of Sid and a separate disk of Windows. I have never lost any data. I am not having that sort of an issue.

What I want is to really REALLY learn Debian and how to maintain Sid so I can perhaps participate more actively in its development and maintenance as a useful reporter of bugs and the like. As such, I would really like to know how to rescue old Sid once I have made him go kaput.

Currently I have a partition that boots only in rescue mode. What sorts of logs can I look at to try to figure out what went wrong? Basically, as often seems to happen to me, it died when I tried to do a dist-upgrade. For whatever reason, it seems that if I just reinstall over the top of it and dist upgrade to testing, then from there to Sid, it always seems to work. I have no idea why it keeps choking on doing the dist-upgrade when Sid is already up and running. Perhaps to do with graphics drivers? But when I was watching the install, it looked for all the world like it backed NVidia out on its own, then upgraded the drivers...

Any help appreciated.

Try looking at /var/log/messages or /var/log/Xorg.
If you You'll see what messages are available, then you can use the cat command to view messages.
Example
you can scroll thru the whole file, using page-up or page-dn.

xorg.... So even though it LOOKED like nvidia was removed and reinstalled, it appears it was not. Or else something about the way apt-get does that fails to update some file somewhere so xorg knows where to look.

Does that sound like a bug? How would I go about investigating further? I can of course post the log for xorg, but I am not sure how that would help debug what happened with the apt-get dist-upgrade such that it did not properly install or somehow configure the nvidia drivers...

I dunno. Whatever anyone needs to help, I will do.

Do you know what nvidia driver you need.
Try lspci to find out what card you have.
Is network wireless or ethernet?
If ethernet tryThen update & finish the upgrade on the system.
With debian sid you have to do dist-upgrade quite often so try

Oh I got the driver. What I was asking is if anyone knows why the dist-upgrade messed it up. I was watching the upgrade scroll and saw that it appeared to uninstall the old Nvidia driver and then install the more recent, and then it gave me a message I had to "ok" to get past that said to get the Nvidia driver to be recognized I would have to restart the computer. Which I did. And it would not start.

I then waited for several months (lol!) and basically did another dist upgrade, then looked at the xorg log per the above instructions and low and behold it showed it could not find the nvidia driver. So I went back and installed nvidia-detect and ran it, and installed the suggested driver.

Now everything works, more or less. There is an error or sorts on startup to do with something in a jobs list. I will look that up in a bit. But what I am wondering is where I could look to find out why, even though dist-upgrade SEEMED to uninstall and reinstall the latest Nvidia driver, it nevertheless either was not there or was not found buy xorg.

Try these logs:
/var/log/apt/term.log
/var/log/dpkg.log
/var/log/apt/history.log

Also depending on how you rotate your logs you may also have some older compressed versions of these logs. Your upgrade problem may not be in your latest log.

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Steve Stites

I just experienced the same problem that you did, with my external drive, which has never been connected to the machine that I was connecting to. My drive has an xorg.conf file so all I had to do is Now it's up & running.

It's been a while since the last time I used a computer with an nvidia card, but it might have been a buggy driver problem or an incompatibility between the driver and the kernel you were using at the moment. I remember having the last problem from time to time on a PC with an nvidia card.

There seem to be a couple of issues. Not sure they are all to do with NVidia. One seems to be with a change in UUID from my dist-upgrade. I think I will go ahead and mark this closed. If the uuid issue or any logs lead me to further questions I'll post something else. The specific issue I had has been solved.

Thanks!