Hi, recently tested a replacement flash chip on MS6178 mainboard, it had an earlier BIOS and seemed to initialize hardware successfully, thereby (possibly!) solving a longstanding problem. Regrettably, something else has gone wrong.

The boot looks OK, straight into the GDE or KDE logon, whichever I want, but then, after user + password, the screen blanks- either a nice uniform grey for gnome or a 2 tone blue wave pattern for K, and stays there.

Strange to say, restoring the original bios doesn't help.

I can get a console up, and have tried killing and restarting the desktops.

I have removed/ reinstalled GDM & KDM.

Trying to get openoffice running from console, or from /bin, I'm getting errors- unable to locate some files.

I'm running this comp in order to test corebios, (the factory bios seemed OK with M$ but not with Linux) and it took some time to get the applications I need for it, so I am reluctant to rebuild the OS at this stage.

If there's a relatively simple fix, that will be useful. If not, I'll persevere with what I have, as it's all CLI anyway.

Thanks.

1. You must be having the logs ?

2. fsck your partitions first (force it)



Best

A. Mani

Thanks Amani, fsck resulted in "clean" so the problem isn't there. I think this is either a mainboard or BIOS problem, when the coreboot testing is done I'll clean install.