[mdlug] Linux box won't boot

[Harry Burleson]

You said that after the upgrade from Debian 6 to Debian 7 (Did you perform an
in-place upgrade?) you had these problems.

You saw the the Compaq logo and the GRUB menu briefly. That suggests that:
- your BIOS is ok
- your hardware might be ok
- your MBR is ok - at least the part with the bootloader code
- also, your GRUB is probably ok

Maybe the reason you are unable to boot from the live CD is that the boot
order in your BIOS does not have the CD drive listed as the first boot device.

I presume you have GRUB 2 and not GRUB legacy. One possible reason for failure
to load Debian is the upgrade process incorrectly set up the
/boot/grub/grub.cfg file incorrectly - specifically, it did not assign the
correct values to UUID (universally unique identifier) for the boot and root
partitions. You would normally get an error message when GRUB fails to load the
kernel but maybe it could fail silently.

Also, when you poke around in grub.cfg
you may want to turn off the quiet option for the kernel:
... vmlinuz ...ro quiet ....

I'm not sure about the blank screen. Does your monitor have two inputs? Does
your BIOS have a setting to select internal or external video device?

Some GRUB references:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub-2.html

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Grub2

http://www.aboutlinux.info/2005/11/how-to-repair-corrupt-mbr-and-boot.html

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/


- harry