New installation not working
 

I just installed Mandrade 9.1 on a hp pavillion. It is dual bootable with XP. Everything seemed to go well with the installation after the updates it said installation sucessful and said reboot so I clicked reboot. When the machine rebooted I did notice that when it got to the "finding module dependencies" part it said "ldm_validate_partition_table() disk read failed" it repeated this a couple of times then proceded with the boot up. It launched a first time setup wizard. I chose KDE as a theme and set up my email info. After the wizard compleated the screen eventually changed to blue with a couple of waves in it. Then it just sits there. Occoasionally I see a window open and quickly close. I have let it sit there for over an hour and a desktop screen never comes up. I can move the mouse around the screen and the dual boot works fine because I can still get to XP. Does anyone know what my problem could be. Also for some reason I had to use the text version of the installer because all the graphical ones just made my screen go black.

Ironically, i bought a magazine yesterday, with an ad on the back claiming HP is the leader in Linux technology ... if you are alledgeable, give their support a call ... might be a chuckle.

On the monitor thing, i'd be inclined to say that it might have detected your graphics card wrong, HP's are dodgy in that regard sometimes ... i'd suggest, you get to the console and use xf86config

If you've only just installed, you might consider, simply reinstalling, and mindful of what it tells you it's using.
That might resolve the ldm message too (though it seems unlikely)

Could the ldm thing be related to NTFS i wonder.

i tried re installing got the exact same result. I am totally new to Linux so I have no idea where to go from here. Does anyone know why the screen would just sit there with a watch arter the first time wizard has been ran? for hours?

does anyone hjave any ideas