Fedora Core 11 won't boot without a monitor
After much trial and error this solved it.
I added the following to my kernel parameters:
nomodeset
This sounds very odd, especially the powered off monitor part, I would imagine that your problem is somewhere else. However if you plan on booting headless than you don't need to boot X at all, modify /etc/inittab and change the line id:5:initdefault: to id:3:initdefault:
and reboot, or conversely add 3 to the end of the kernel options when you boot through grub.
Lets see how far that gets you. If you have any mechanism to monitor what is happening via the serial port that would be tremendously informative also.