RedHat boot problem

[PeteyDnk]

I had RedHat 7.1, Mandrake 8.0, and W2K all running fine on my machine. I shut down my computer last night and now when I boot my PC and select RedHat from LILO, it starts loading RedHat, runs fine, and when it comes to the command-line login it flickers the screen as if it is going to the GUI login and then the screen goes black. The machine is not shutting down, however if I press CTRL-ALT-DEL twice it shuts down (screen remains black) and reboots. Any ideas what is wrong or how I could fix it? Thanks!

Peter

[Huggy]

does it remain blank all the way in the reboot-up aswell?

how are the others working?

[Lem Sip]

Hi Petey

It sounds like an X misconfiguration to me. X is probably trying to start with a resolution that is too high for your monitor so the monitor just switches off.

Did you run the X test when you installed your distro? No matter here's how to fix it.

When you load the distro that is giving you problems it goes straight into the gui but if there was no gui but just a command line then it displays fine.

When the screen switches off then switch to a text login screen with the following keys:

Alt+Ctrl+F1

That will bring the screen back to a text login and log in as root.

Reconfigure X by running:

Xconfigurator

from the command line. Change your default resolution to 800 x 600 or something smaller for each colour depth than what it was. A lot of older monitors can't display 1024 x 768 or higher resolutions but 800 x 600 is generally pretty safe.

If you get some mouse errors when you're running Xconfigurator then edit the file /etc/sysconfig/mouse and delete the line the error says. The line that gave me problems was the fifth line that specified the /dev/mouse device. I removed it and then Xconfigurator ran fine.

Then I rebooted with Alt+Ctrl+Delete and violla I could see the graphical login when it came back up.

Lem

[PeteyDnk]

Thanks, got it all running. Appreciate the help much. Re-configuring X was what I needed to do.

Peter

[PeteyDnk]

Ok, now that I have that all running, I have another question. Yesterday (before I started having the problem) I was running GAIM from RedHat through our SOCKS4 proxy here at school. I just can't get Mandrake to run it. When I set it up with the proxy and everything... I try to login and it says "could not connect to host" almost as if it doesn't even see the proxy. Any ideas?