Nvidia 3d + HD Problems

jimm_dodd · 03-31-2005, 09:49 PM

I have just installed Mandrake 10.1 and I seem to have 2 problems with my computer now. I am a complete linux newbie - but have been using computers for yonks, and have only just now bit the bullet to install Linux on my family computer. However now I have been accused by the rest of the family of completely ruining the whole computer setup.

Let me go through problems:

Firstly I installed linux originally without a hitch, but then when I tried to boot back into xp I had a ¨Unbootable_Mount_Drive¨ blue screen come up, even though Linux seemed to work fine. I thought that maybe the partitions had done something to the hard drive, so I backed up all i needed and then formatted the entire thing, reinstalling windows first, then linux. Everything seemed to be working fine, but after about the 4th boot into windows, i again got the ´Unbootable_Mount_Drive´ blue screen of death - again even though linux was working fine, and i could access the whole windows hard drive. I ran a ´chkdisk´ through the windows recovery startup thingy, and it fixed one problem, and I could boot into windows again - however now after a week xp has decided to just crash and freeze on the first ´Windows XP´ screen.

Now I´m thinking somehow my harddrive has crashed - but I cant understand why linux would still work if windows does not.

That is my main problem that i need to fix - however my secondary problem is with my graphics card on linux. I have a ‎NV17 GeForce4 MMX 440-SE card, and I have installed the nvidia driver, however although it displays most things fine, it seems to cock out whenever I go to play anything with high or 3d graphics. It just goes to black screen (like it is changing resolution) but then comes back to the desktop.

If anyone can be any help with either of these questions it would be much appreciated. Sorry I rambled a bit.

roger.wernersso · 04-01-2005, 03:48 AM

It seems like the NVidia driver isn't installed properly. I've got a 440MX myself and it works great, running Mandrake 10.0 at the moment. If you update the driver, the kernel or XFree86 you will probably have to recompile the driver.

PTrenholme · 04-01-2005, 08:30 AM

This may not be relevant, but (on my FC3 system) the MTRR was not set automatically. If yours is set, when you look at /proc/mtrr you should see something like this:

Code:

$ cat /proc/mtrr
reg00: base=0x00000000 (   0MB), size=1024MB: write-back, count=1
reg01: base=0xe0000000 (3584MB), size=  64MB: write-combining, count=1

If your “Memory Type Range Registers” are not set, your system may be slow. And, if you have it set wrong, you may be accessing memory not supported by you card, which might cause a “black” screen.

PTrenholme · 04-01-2005, 08:40 AM

Oh, on your "boot" problem: Are you booting from the Mandrake boot loader, or from your BIOS boot selection? FC3 uses "grub" as the boot loader, and -- to boot from it into XP -- a block like this:

Code:

title Windows
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

need to be in "/boot/grub/grub.conf".

Since you had been booting OK, I suspect that something else is going on. Perhaps a second physical drive for Linux would be a saver solution.

Knurpht · 04-01-2005, 02:41 PM

I can only give some vague instructions to try out, since I experienced this problem with a SuSE/XP dual boot. The fix was either to put, in BIOS, the settings for your HD to or from "LBA"; this would make it possible to boot XP

The Nvidia item is a bit of a problem in SuSE as well. Nvidia doesn't want to give away their drivers to the linux distributions. What you can do is go to nvidia.com and download the latest nvidia-installerpackage. This will install a precompiled kernelmodule or, if your kernel is not recognized, compile a new kernelmodule into the kernel. Reboot to make sure the right modules are loaded.