Every couple of years, I succumb to the temptation of trying to build another Frankenstein.
Specifically, I am trying to add to an existing PC both (a) Fedora (2.4.22) to the existing physical disk
drive with Win98 and (b) another physical disk (an from HP desktop with Win XP and a fried motherboard).

Actually, I just gave up on adding the additional physical disk: HP puts their "backup media" on a FAT32
partition which is the first partition on the rive - this has a very proprietary boot loader, and I
cannot even finish booting when I set this disk up as the master (and only) drive in the system. If anyone has
some worthwhile learning on this, I would love to hear it.

I am something of a Linux newbie, and while I have both the original drives Win98 and Fedora
booting, there is a bunch of stuff I cannot figure out.

So any help would be greatly appreciated!


Q. Invalid Display Resolution

The initial boot screen and the boot-time messages are visible, but (on the monitor I wish to use) I see an
"invalid video signal" message when the desktop should be displayed. Using a different monitor, I see the
desktop, not this message. How can I change this setting (hopefully, without having to bring up the desktop)?


Q. Second CD-Rom Drive

First CD drive seems perfect. Inserting a CD gets auto-mount to run fine.
Hardware manager shows the second drive, correctly identifying it as manufactured by Sony, but shows up as
dev/scd0 (what does this mean?). I am trouble by the fact that "cdrom1" is shown twice when you right
click on the desktop to get to "Disks", as it appears twice in /etc/fstab. At boot-up I see a message
"cannot stat /dev/cdrom1 - No such file or directory"; there is such a file, but obviously something is
mal-configured. Inserting a disk fails to get auto-mount to work properly. I think Fedora is allocating this
as /dev/hdd, but this does not seem to accomplish anything useful.

for the first question: X11 probably isn't setting your resolution correctly. If you're using Xorg, I've always had luck with 'X -configure' command (it might be -autoconfigure or something else, anyway RTFM X).

Second q: read the manpages for mount(8) and fstab(5). typing the command 'mount /dev/scd0' might work (or maybe its 'mount /dev/scd1', you did say it was a second drive).

Thanks for the response. I did a complete reinstall (probably the 15th time), but this time after upgrading the box to 256MB of RAM. This fixed all the old issues, but leaves me with a couple of new questions.

1) Fedora 6 does (eventually) manage to successfully browse the Windows workgroup and retreive the names/IPs of the other machines on the LAN. "Eventually" means about 10 minutes. Is there any way to speed this up?
2) If I log into the "guest" account I created, I get an appropriate selection of screen resolutions when navigating Preferences ... Screen Resolution. If I log in as root, the display resolution is set to 800x600, and that is the top resolution listed in Preferences ... Screen Resolution. How do I fix this?
3) By the way, is there any Fedora 6 documentation that addresses this sort of stuff: when I go looking for documentation, I find a hodge-podge of standards documentation, Fedora 6 internals, and not-so-useful documentation on Linux and prior Fedora versions?

Thanks
Jonathan

I found the screen resolution problem. Apparently I somehow got 2 different kernels installed (nope, I really never asked for this) ..2798 and ..2868. Grub was set up to start the former. I fixed this and the issue seems to have gone away.

Jonathan