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After several successful upgrades following http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2013 I became a bit reckless and did an upgrade on a rather old machine with a quite basic and well-working LMDE Mate i686 installation, for once omitting the disk image backup and the check with the live version… bad voodoo, obviously: now shortly after the Grub menu the screen turns black and remains so. On the GUI tty7 a few hieroglyphics appear; on tty1-6 the screen remains black but I can login blindly and shutdown. I can also ssh to the machine gathering the following — Which reminded me that during the upgrade while building the kernel modules several warnings about missing radeon drivers were issued — at the time I didn't realize that this is a Radeon card… but lsmod does list radeon.
sgfxi cannot find fglrx drivers for this old card. installing the native Xorg driver with sgfxi -n did not help.
Marco is not running; when I try starting it from the command line it complains about no X display found.
Xorg is running, but killing it and running Xorg -configure segfaults.

Any ideas?  I'll try the live version tomorrow, if that runs it is probably better to do a fresh install and then to restore the home directory.

Well, the live USB stick readily runs… inxi -G reports driver: ati,radeon — ati is missing on the upgraded system. How could I repair this?
BTW, in the live system Xorg -configure also segfaults.

I'm thinking you answered your own question above. Clean installs are less trouble-prone than upgrades, always.

kevinthefixer wrote:Clean installs are less trouble-prone than upgrades, always.

Well, of course. (That's what is running on another a bit less old machine right now.)
But then it takes hours and hours to recreate all those individual settings, printer drivers etc. etc. and pulling all those additional installs just to get that machine to work again like before. And although I keep logs of most these things, separate for every machine (some of them comprising >100 items), there are always a dozen little nags I had once set and then forgotten, so I know for sure that my colleague will have to call on me several times for help again over the next weeks…
Now I will restore his complete /home directory from backup which should take care of many such settings, but will it fit exactly for the new clean install or will it introduce some nasty little hidden inconsistencies?

That's why I mostly prefer upgrades (and very much like rolling releases), accepting minor troubles. But a black screen is a rather major trouble.

Have found the warnings in the logs: although these files are present in that path.
Re-running went through without these warnings bit did not help.
Abandoning this machine…