Blank screen after startup????

[mjquilly]

I just installed Mandrake7.2 and everything went fine on the install process. However, when rebooting after the install finished, I have a blank screen. Everything initializes ok (mounting filesystems, starting service), but before I see a login prompt or the desktop, the monitor shuts off and so do the keyboard lights. There is still some hard drive activity for about 20-30 seconds after the monitor shuts off. My hardware setup is this:

Gigabyte GA6VX7-4A mobo w/ Celeron 433
Matrox G200 8MB Video Card

(I don't think any other h/w would matter)

Also, mandrake auto detected 64MB of ram, so i entered 128 when it asked if that is right since I really do have 128.

Any ideas?

[linuxluis]

One problem I ran into myself was that red hat would do the same thing. I look around for a couple of days but I did find the problem. What you might do is check your video card. I found out if you set it wrong what the box will do is shut the monitor off but It will keep on working. what init are you using if you dont mind me asking? try to just log in as init 3 see if that work for you.


tux ;)

[mjquilly]

didn't work, could it be a bad install of gnome?

[bdg1983]

Yes, it could be a bad install of Gnome. I think linuxluis was also thinking you have some problems with X, especially if you have default runlevel set to 5 so that X boots at startup. Try typing linux 3 at Lilo prompt (or if you use different label than "linux" for loading Linux, you use the same command you usually have but put that 3 after it) so that it doesn't start X at bootup and see what happens.

If you can then see the login prompt and you can log into your system, it is most likely a problem with X. Try starting X with startx and see if you get some error messages. You might also want to try reconfiguring X or try to use some other window manager than Gnome to see if that's a Gnome problem.

Good luck.