OK, so I installed Mandriva 2007 Spring, and for some odd reason I can't get into it. During installation it recognized all my hardware, even my sound card. Whenever I go to boot it up, I go into the verbose mode and watch everything as it's being loaded, and the only thing that fails is my sound card. everything else starts up just fine, and I even see the mouse cursor for a few seconds before it just stops. hard drive is still being accessed for about 30 seconds, then nothing happens.

My partitions are set up as follows:
4GB Swap
30GB / Ext3
56GB /boot Ext3

Anybody got an idea? I really want to get back into Linux and learn everything, but this is kinda discouraging. Thanks!

If you're seeing a mouse cursor, the system is pretty much completing a boot but the X server/graphical system is probably misconfigured and hanging on startup. For starters on troubleshooting, please post your graphics card.

Right, sorry about that. It's a 7800GT.

Works fine with 7600GST as it should with most cards now that Mandriva is using the framebuffer by default.

If you suspect that the soundcard is in any way involved, just disable or remove it to see where that gets you.

On a side note, is your boot partition really 56GB? Even 100MB is lots of space for a boot partition. 4GB swap is way too much as well in most situations.

How would you suggest I setup my partitions? This is a new install so redoing everything isn't a big deal.

swap 2GB
/boot 100MB ext2 or ext3
/ 8 to 12 GB xfs
/var 2 to 3 GB xfs
/home the remaining space ext3 or, if you intend to save larger files, xfs

Thanks! For some reason i didn't get the email notify of your post... oh well.

After reading the reviews for Mandrake 2007, I've decided that it's not worth it. Can someone recommend a distro? As I understand it, Ubuntu is generally pretty good for noobs like myself.

Yes, Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS. I don't know what you read about Mandriva that made you reconsider, it's far from bad. Anyway, you can use the scheme I outlined in my previous post with any distro.

The reviews I read are over in the Distro Reviews Section of the Main Menu.

Thanks for all your advice, I'll give Ubuntu a quick spin.

Well, here I am using the Kubuntu 7.04 Live DVD. It's installing right now, but the oddest thing is that I have to start the dang DVD in graphical safe mode. Hopefully once it's installed properly, it'll work properly.

EDIT: OK, so the install finished, and I was able to boot without a problem. Then I tried to change my graphics settings, and everyhting went downhill. It went to a gray screen with just the mouse cursor, and no way to get out of it, so I restarted. After Kubuntu finished loading, all I had was a black screen with the cursor.

The graphics settings I tried to change were my monitor to one that can handle my normal resolution, and changing the GPU driver from vesa to Nvidia 7 Series.

the driver needs to be "nv". NV is the open source driver, which supports 2D only. You should install the nvidia driver if you need 3D.

Where did you change these settings? In xorg.conf? Then why did you try it, were you having some display problem that required you to install the Nvidia driver? Crawl before you walk.

You can choose to boot in safe mode from Grub.. which will go to a CLI...
and run...

and just take the defaults for everything. Once you get a working system again, then you you can work on installing the Nvidia driver.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto

IGF

I changed the settings in the System Properties in the GUI. I wasn't necessarily having a problem, but the display was only running at 800x600.

Thanks for your help!

It worked great!