Hi all. I'm sort of at my wit's end- tried everything I can think of, but I'll try to keep a long story short while being as thorough as I can.

Recently assembled myself a new computer using a mix of old and new parts.

New 650W power source.
New Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard.
New NVIDIA GeFORCE 8800GTOC graphics card.
Core-2 Quad processor.
4G of ram.
Old hard drive, 40G.
Old CD-ROM (no DVD) drive.
old floppy drive.

I wanted to do a dual boot between winXP-64bit and some 64-bit version of Linux. Installed WinXP first, as per instructions I found online, and partitioned the hard drive. Win XP now has roughly 14 gigs, an unformatted 14 gig section was left to Linux, and the rest was partitioned into a space explicitedly for shared files.

Finally got Mandriva Free on the 3-cd set and it seemed to install just fine. Now when I boot up the computer, it gives me a boot screen letting me chose between Mandriva and Windows. From here Windows boots just fine. If I go into Mandriva, I get a prompt to login (no problems there) and then a command prompt:

[user@localhost ~]$

I know next to nothing about command-line in Linux, but from what I know I'm supposed to type in "startx" to get to the GUI. When I do so a screen pops up:

X Window system Version 1.3.0
(etc...)
(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Tue Mar 18 11:44:02 2008
(==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"
Using vt 7
(EE) No devices detected.

Fatal server error:
no screens found
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
[user@localhost ~]$

*sigh* Go easy. I am, as you can guess, a complete newb to Linux. So far trying to get it running has been a hair-pulling effort.

Since you have just installed Mandriva and haven't had time to set any app preferences to your liking, you won't loose anything if you re-install Mandriva.

Go slowly and be sure you understand the prompts and what the consequences of your choices will be.

Take notes so that you can come back with specific questions and specific information of what the prompts asked of you.

The graphical environment should have been set up as part of the installation. You may have overlooked something during installation.

Wow! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

I gave it a shot, just as you said. Wiped the linux partition and did the install from scratch. Very carefully made sure it had the right settings for the graphics card, etc.

Still no luck- the exact same thing happened. :-/