Hi, I'm pretty fresh to all this Linux stuff. I've got a alienware laptop with a Quadro FX go 1000 gfx card....external USB keyboard and mouse.I've installed fedora 7 to an external USB drive, with the grub loader on my internal drive.

The install went fine, after it finished it asked for a reboot, which I did. Then it seem to take an age booting back up loading all the services...pausing on 'starting CUPS' and 'starting HAL daemon' for at least 30secs. Up came the GUI for setting up the system, I clicked next and then it hangs...mouse locks up. Re boot and try again...this time it doesn't get in to the GUI it locks up before.

Trying again this morning with 'rhgb quiet' (in the grub loader) turned off...it started booting up, then it started displaying the text.

scsi 0:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to the dead drive (see pics below)and its also comes up with insmod: error inserting '/lib/usb-storage.ko': -1 File exists

http://www.lukewoolfson.co.uk//linux_2.jpg

http://www.lukewoolfson.co.uk//linux_1.jpg

someone thought it might be something to do with a IRQ conflict, so I disabled my parallel port and IR port in my BIOS, and removed my external Mouse/keyboard.....still no joy. The last few times I've booted it up all the services load fine...although a bit slow. Then after the last service is loaded , it displays loading the graphics card driver and the screen goes blank.

please help!

PS: one more thing, when I look at the drive in windows it shows nothing being on the disk....is this normal. under the disk management the disk has a 102mb partition and a 55.79GB partition

I got it working in some half cocked way.

I changed the boot option to boot in mode 3 and let it run its course. It either halted on 'starting cup' or 'starting sendmail'.......what are these services anway? I then hit a few keys on the keyboard to see if it was completely dead...they were displayed on the screen but then started to repeat until the screen was full. I think its somthing to do with the keyboard/mouse rather than the graphics now.

There is a keyboard on the laptop, with a touch pad. On the boot up it displays the touch pad as 2 mice even though there is only one and its disabled in the bios...very odd.

Anyway I rebooted and again put 3 at the end of the boot up line. When it came to laoding the services I went No for everything. It then went in to the command line and it typed startX.....the GUI booted up fine. I went in to the termal window and started up the network service.. then the mouse/keyboard frooze up...so I plugged i nthe external mouse keyboard and seems to be ok now.

I think one of the services is through my systme in to highwirte how I do find out which one?

to get nvidia driver, in a terminal do (you have to be in init mode 3 and with root as current account):

1) ftp download.nvidia.com
2) it asks u for an user, write anonymous
3) and a password, your email
4) do the CD command to get to
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Li..._64/100.14.23/
wich is the latest version for x64 linux versions
5) do the GET NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-100.14.23-pkg2.run while you are in the directory from step 4
6) when u finish downloading the file, do the BYE or EXIT command to end the ftp session
7) sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-100.14.23-pkg2.run (then the nvidia setup will ask you some questions, answer yes to all of them)
8) restart your computer, if u want, begin with init mode 3, do a startx, if it goes well, restart and boot in mode 5 (X11).

and about ur post:
If your linux freezes even in mode 3, it means some service is causing a problem, couldn't tell u the reason because I'm a too. But if you can do a startx it means this is no video related, but I suggest installing the nvidia driver to get 3d support fully enabled.

Sometimes I get the same freezes during two or three different services, while shuting down, like smart-something and cups I think.

Ta I an't got a 64bit chip...shouldn't I download a different driver?

of course, you have to download the x86 version of the driver. I think it's almost the same folder. In fact, it's ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/100.14.23

the file is NVIDIA-Linux-x86-100.14.23-pkg1.run (currently).

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/latest.txt will always say wich folder has the latest version of the driver.

good luck!

BTW..."cups" is your printing sub-system

If you haven't connected and/or configured a printer yet, you will get error messages during startup. I do, but they don't cause any problems.

Let me know if you get things figured out!