My computer seemed to be fine earlier today (9/10/09) and I know I shut it down properly but as of 7:15 today, it wouldn't start up, just a black screen not even a prompt to start X. And yes, the monitor was turned on.

My system is SuSE 10 and I have a GeForce FX 5200 video card and use the Nvidia driver which up til now, worked flawlessly.

I checked to see if any usb sticks were in the machine and there was nothing that should not be there. Right now, I had to run Puppy to boot into anything.

Puppy can access the hard drive and I can get files from it and look at the files.

I wonder what I did wrong. I am heartbroken.

What do I check? How do I check for anything if the system will not boot to a screen?

Could this happen if the hard drive is too full?

hi

black screen....when power button is turned on...are you seeing the bios splash screen or the bios Post checks
if you are seeing them....and you made no changes to bios recently...including bios flashing

do you see a bootloader such as grub or lilo?

do you see a kernel splash (or splashy) or any kernel messages?

OR do you mean at all times (except bootable cd) black screen?

There was only the monitor info showing, it might have had the NVidia info too, I don't remember but nothing else, not even the bios check info nor the memory test. No bootloader (Grub) nor a splash screen. I had not done anything to the bios.

When I booted into Puppy, I noticed that the bios info and mem test did show up then. After I was finished with Puppy and told it to shut down and took out the CD and USB stick, I tried to boot into SuSE again hoping that it would "make a liar out of me" and SuSE finally did boot! As a matter of fact it worked for me just now.

That was very weird though. It would be cool if Puppy fixed whatever was wrong.

Could this be a warning that the hard drive will fail?

It happened again but this time, I had my husband look at it. He changed the video card (no results), he plugged in a different monitor (no results) and then he took out the memory and tried each one, one at a time and then it started to boot and had the display! So he tested each of my 4 memory cards, one at a time and found the ones that were going bad and bought me new memory and installed them (along with a second hard drive while he was at it).

Now my computer works very nicely! Now I know that my problem was bad memory.