Black screen after installing SuSE 10.1 with XP already installed
 

I finally decided to learn LINUX and followed my friends advise to install SuSE 10.1 on my XP machine (hoping to have both OS as a dual boot). After completing the installation step using CD 1, my system was rebooted. After this first reboot, I ended up getting a black screen and it seems that I can't do anything else and is the reason why I decided to join and post this message.

Some background...

- Have XP installed in my PC (Desktop)
- It is a Dell Dimension 4100 machine; BIOS version A11; Pentium III processor 1 GHz; 2-256 PC133 RAM (512 total); trinitron monitor; nVidia graphics card (GeForce 2 Go with 64MB)
- Installed SuSE 10.1 on the same hard drive as my XP (C:)
- Used the LINUX installer to shrink window and to create the partition.
- Preparation steps completed; Install steps completed; configuration can't be performed since I keep getting the black screen.

Please help on how I can resolve the problem. Again please be very specific since I'm pretty new at this. Thank you in advance.

By the way, I can't boot to XP as well. So at this point, my PC is useless.

you should do more than one poartitions to have linux run .How many did u do after
resizing the initial partition?
(I also installed suse 10.1 on 2 pc's yesterday) : )
Do not format any of the partitions yet!!!!!!!!!!!!
For windows not butting there has been a problem to the bootloader from not installing correctly linux.
tell me how much space will u use for linux and how many partitions u have made for linux?

I actually did not perform any activities prior to starting the SuSE 10.1 installation on my PC with XP in it already. So when I started the install, I changed the partition suggested by the LINUX installer to use the same hard drive (C:), to shrink the windows partition, and finally to only create a partition of 2000 MB out of the free sapce available (total space is 60 GB, 15 is already used for Windows, 25 left for Windows, and 20 was supposed to be for LINUX).

Everything was going well until the system was rebooted and now I'm stuck with a black screen with no way of typing anything or getting pass it.

Please help. Again, pretty new at this and would appreciate a step by step instruction.

Hi, I had a similar problem with Suse 10.1 !
The guys at Novell didn't do a too good job with graphical interface and monitor recognition !!


Can you boot from your installation media ?
If yes: Do so and try to start sax then to reconfigure the graphical interface !

If no: .....think you are in deep sh...

My PC does not boot up from CD when I restart it with SuSE 10.1 Install CD 1 in it.

I do however can boot from the A drive. Is there anything I can copy down to a diskette that will help me?

Do u have the bios option to boot from cd?

Yes I have the option to boot from CD first. I was told by a friend that my master boot record may be messed up.

you should still be able to boot from CD, BIOS will initiate that before the MBR.

What about booting winxp, maybe the SUSE cd is messed up

I think you should try booting from your XP CD and do a recovery to get to a prompt. Once your at a C: prompt type "FIXMBR" and that should at least get you into windows.
I had a similar problem with Suse 10.1. And after a lot of research I found out that there wasn't any support or proper drivers for my video cards (Dual SLI Nvidia). I kept trying to work around the problem, but had no luck. So I ended up switching to a different Linux Distro.

Thanks guys. I actually was able to get through with the installation by re-downloading a new installation CD from the web and re-installing LINUX. Everything is good for me now.