Boot failures after installation

metaprax · 03-02-2007, 11:01 AM

I was plagued with boot failures after trying to install linux (Gentoo, Debian, Fedora). Setup is ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard with on-board NVIDIA monitor, AMD 64x2 3800+, NVIDIA sound, Seagate SATA and Pioneer CD/DVD. Linspire and Freespire loaded no problem but they do not have a high enough kernal to use my video capture card.

Usually the boot would start and fail at etc/fstab. My gaphic screen would go blank and the monitor would report "Out of Range Signal".

Switching to the text monitor [ctrl-alt-F1] I could see that the boot was hanging at etc/fstab.

What finally worked was removing all cards from my machine, booting from the ASUS CD into FreeDOS, updating the BIOS downloaded onto a USB stick from ASUS, erasing and reformating the hard drive as DOS with the Seagate CD and then installing Fedora Core 6 x86_64 from CD disks.

I have not tried reinstalling my sound card, video-out card or video capture card. I am writing this email from my Fedore COre 6 machine though.

puntjuh · 03-02-2007, 12:42 PM

This: "monitor would report "Out of Range Signal"."

You should check your xorg.conf and see what horizontal&vertical hz/khz it has set. These values are most likely to be wrong, check on the back of your monitor or in the guide provided with it, what the hor/ver syncs are. And place these correct values in your xorg.conf.

Here as taken from my xorg.conf

Code:

# **********************************************************************
# Monitor section
# **********************************************************************

# Any number of monitor sections may be present

Section "Monitor"

    Identifier  "My Monitor"

# HorizSync is in kHz unless units are specified.
# HorizSync may be a comma separated list of discrete values, or a
# comma separated list of ranges of values.
# NOTE: THE VALUES HERE ARE EXAMPLES ONLY.  REFER TO YOUR MONITOR'S
# USER MANUAL FOR THE CORRECT NUMBERS.

    HorizSync   30-70

#    HorizSync  30-64         # multisync
#    HorizSync  31.5, 35.2    # multiple fixed sync frequencies
#    HorizSync  15-25, 30-50  # multiple ranges of sync frequencies

# VertRefresh is in Hz unless units are specified.
# VertRefresh may be a comma separated list of discrete values, or a
# comma separated list of ranges of values.
# NOTE: THE VALUES HERE ARE EXAMPLES ONLY.  REFER TO YOUR MONITOR'S
# USER MANUAL FOR THE CORRECT NUMBERS.

    VertRefresh 50-120

EndSection