I had a Dell Poweredge 2950 that had been faithfully running proxmox 1.9 (upgraded from 1.7, to 1.8, finally to 1.9) for about a year now. I finally got enough time – and pestered other people about moving their virtual machines to other servers – in order to redo the machine with additional RAM and Prox2.3

So I upgraded the server from 16GB to 32GB – DDR2FB so… – and attempted to boot off the ISO Prox 2.3 image.

As this is a 2950 and not say an R520, the DRAC (not idrac) is pretty much useless – even with the “enterprise” level, it’s bare bones at best. The newer idrac systems (drac6, 7+) are all much better for remote management. As such, I had a monitor and keyboard plugged into this server on my workbench.

Prox displays and says “hit enter to boot”. Hit enter. Screen gets all fuzzy – digitally – and I can’t actually see anything to proceed. Reboot. This time I put in some arguments:
debug vga=normal

Detecting network settings … done
\nInstallation aborted – unable to continue (type EXIT or CTRL-D to reboot)

Reboot
debug vga=normal noacpi
Same issue – unable to continue

Well this is going nowhere fast. Aha! I see the BIOS was 2.2.6 and the newest release is 2.7.0 – this may be the problem. Grab my trusty USB drive and format for DOS/win98 bootable, put the BIOS flashing executable on the drive, boot off the USB and update the BIOS.

Same issue. Argh.

I attempted the debug vga=normal again, only this time instead of rebooting I decided to check out the /var/log area and see if anything was posted.

There was an Xorg log file – it was the only log file in there – and I found some interesting stuff:

XF86OpenConsole setsidfailed operation not permitted
open ACPI failed – file not found

Great. Just on a whim, since I’ve seen the digitally Xorg screens from my past experience with FBSD, I decide to try a different monitor.

Eureka! The problem was my 19″ LCD was being read by Xorg as something not compatible with the currently loaded drivers. I ended up using a spare 15″ LCD and it booted right up.

TL:DR Keep a small LCD around for certain linux experiments.