Two questions: 1) is there some random "magic" on the kernel command line (something needed specificly for the old nvidia card)? If so, that that "magic" is likely breaking things with the nvidia card "missing".
2) is the "server" trying to come up with a graphical login? It is almost always a bad idea for a server to every come up with a graphical login. I consider having any machine coming up in a graphical login is going to be problematical at some point. And anytime you do some sort of hardware change is good time for problems. Before you swap the new video card into the "server", change its target server to NOT be the graphical login, *before* you shut it down. And also before shutting it down clean any extra stuff on the command like and remove the quiet and splash options off of the kernel command line (if any). This will make the boot up "verbose". If it is going to crash or hang, you will know what was the last thing the kernel had to say. At Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:34:01 -0600 "D. R. Evans" <[email protected]> wrote: > > Last week on my main desktop machine I swapped out an old nvidia card for > which the nouveau driver was giving me trouble, and replaced it with an > AMD-based RX550 video card. Everything worked great. > > So I did the same on my main server for the house, whose (different) old > nvidia card was also giving problems (but different problems). I bought > another, identical, ARX550 card. I figured the replacement operation would all > go as well as the prior exchange had done. But nope. With the AMD card in > place, at boot time the server's GRUB finds the grub.cfg file and then finds > the kernel and starts to boot. Lovely. I get the usual message about loading > initramfs ... and then nothing further ever happens. The disk light shows > activity for a while, but nothing ever changes on the screen to show the > system actually booting. > > I had naively thought that simply putting in an AMD card -- especially a model > that I'd already used successfully in a different machine -- was pretty much > guaranteed to work; but obviously I was wrong. > > Does anyone know what I might need to do in order to get past the "loading > initramfs" step? > > On the server machine, I have put everything back the way it was (i.e., it now > has the old nvidia card again) which means that the home LAN is up and running > again and enables me to send this e-mail out. > > I know this e-mail is light on details, but I'm not sure what additional info > would be useful. > > Oh, both the server and the desktop are running up-to-date trixie. > > Doc > -- Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364 Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services [email protected] -- Webhosting Services
