Please Help me
Today I turned off my computer and when I tried to start it again, Mandrake 10.1 loads, but when its about to initialize Xorg, the screen turns black....nothing.

I am running MDK10.1, Kde 3.4, P4, 512MB Ram, ATI Sapphire 256mb video card.

Please help me!! My assignment is on there and it's due tommorow....

If you enter [CTRL]-[ALT]-F2 to get to the second virtual terminal, can you login?

You may want to login as root and change the run level to 3.
telinit 3

You can run the drakeconf program for setting up the video from the console. Again, you need to be root to run it. It is called XFdrake.

In the meantime, you could use the console to access your assignment and copy it somewhere to be safe.

Nothing initialises..including my keyboard, so I can't type [CTRL]+[ALT]+F2
Please help me

What you want to do is change the default run level in the file /etc/inittab

First, boot up with the first install disk and enter the option rescue. In this mode, the entire linux system is running in memory.

There is a line that determines the default runlevel.
First you need to select the menu option to mount your normal filesystems under /mnt.

Running off the rescue system, the console editor program available is "vim-minimal"

vim-minimal /mnt/etc/inittab

There is a line that says:
# The default runlevel is defined here
id:5:initdefault:

You want to change the 5 to a 3 for Mandrake Linux.
This command will locate the line and change the number
:/id:5:initdefault/s/5/3/

Now you can save the file
:wq

Reboot the computer. Now you should be able to login to the console.
Either login as the root user, or log in as yourself and su to root later with the command: "su -"
The dash will run a login shell. This will set up the PATH variable correctly for the root user.

Now you can run the XFdrake program to select your video card and monitor resolution.

If you have problems selecting a video driver, you could use the 'vesa' driver which is nearly universal and will give you everything but accelerated graphics.

also, see http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

im in kde but it doesn't realize my keyboard...typing with gok.
what should i do [question mark]