I have an Inspirion 8600 with an NVidia Go5200 card. I had SUSE 9.3 working great on my laptop with twinview enabled. I was installing some new software (unrelated to video drivers) via YaST2 when the internet died on me. YaST2 wouldn't die mid process despide pressing abort. The result was it just sat indefinitely (45 minutes). So I tried killing the process. That didn't work. I let the system sit for a while hoping the process would end on its own. When nothing worked and my computer was useless I told it to reboot (soft). It did that just fine. Unfortunately upon reboot my NVidia drivers no longer work. This is what I have tried to get them back.

I dropped to run level 3
I checked lsmod | grep nvidia. Nothing. So I installed the driver -> modprobe nvidia
I also checked and installed agpgart
I start run level 5...no nvidia driver seems to work. Twinview fails

I tried checking my xorg.conf. Nothing has changed in it. Everything is as it is supposed to be. See below:

Section "Device"
BoardName "GeForce FX Go5200"
BusID "1:0:0"
Driver "nvidia"
Identifier "Device[0]"
Option "TwinView"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-124"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "48-160"
Option "MetaModes" "1600x1200,1680x1050"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Screen 0
VendorName "NVidia"
EndSection

I dropped to RL 3.
I tried re-running SaX2 with the NVidia driver specified and I tried it with the TwinView profile specified using the following command sax2 -m 0=nvidia -b /usr/X11R6/lib/sax/profile/NVidia_TwinView
The NVidia driver still doesn't load.
I go to RL 5. No NVidia driver or TwinView

Finally I tried re-installing the patch (driver) using YaST2. Nothing works.

As one last unsuccessful step I tried compiling the latest set of drivers. That failed for some reason probably having to do with I have never done that before.

So, I have no idea why the NVidia drivers no longer load on boot. I also have no idea why after manually starting the drivers the graphics system doesn't work. Clearly something in a config file is botched, though I have no idea where. I know the hardware still works because WinXP runs just fine.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Try downloading the right driver from NVIDIA. You can download it from another computer and burn it to a CD. It is a .run file, and you run it sh ./Nvidia-*.run. I think the current version is 7170. It will compile a new kernel module for you, redo your config, and generally make things work. Then run SaX2 -m 0=nvidia. Your system should work well.

That was the one thing I really didn't want to have to do. But in the end, it worked as you said. I appreciate the help. Although I am still left to wonder what I actually did to destroy the original working drivers?

I'm not sure. My module has been corrupted a couple of times by different things. Anytime you modify the kernel, it breaks, but last night I had one for no reason. Anyone else have any ideas?