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Hi - from what you describe I had exactly the same problem with an NVidia card - essentially the xwindows doesn't work and you always get a black screen. Here is what I did it might be slightly different as I use GRUB on a dual boot system. When it boots I get asked whether I want to boot into a failsafe system - using this option you only boot into runlevel 3 (If I remember correctly) and it doesn't start Xwindows.
Now you can log on as root and run sax2. Do not worry about the NVidia card at all - just pick the NVidia generic option (18 I think) and choose low resolution monitor etc. Now type startx - this will run the X11 server. If it doesn't work then hit control-alt-backspace and it will get you back to the console. Re-run sax2 with a different config. Eventually you will get up some sort of X windows. Then you need to reboot as normal and run Yast to sort out the best resolution etc.
well it worked but it has effectively lost me the driver i wanted to install.. with the driver pre-loaded in Sax i can't work with OpenGL or 3d acceleration .. thanks for your help though
Sounds to me like the nvidia module isn't loading during boot. It's there when you set it up with Sax2 but then doesn't load when you reboot. First make sure "nvidia" is listed under device section as your driver in your xorg.conf. Then boot into level 3 and become root.
Type: modprobe nvidia
The cursor will just return to the next line if it loads. Then become normal user again and do startx.
The module should load by itself after that. If it doesn't, you'll have to do the modprobe thing again in runlevel 3.
ok i tried the modprobing, it didn't work the 1st time but the second time my Desktop loaded fine.. however when i restarted, it went back to the black screen.
If you followed the instructions by fernley above, that probably changed a lot in that file. You can reset everything with Sax. Boot into run level 3 and do modprobe nvidia. Try that a couple more times. SUSE should start loading that module at boot automatically. Or you can check it before to see if it loaded with the lsmod command.
lsmod will list all the modules that load at boot.
The fact that you've lost the monitor setting may indicate that the problem is not the card/driver but the frequency setting of your monitor. Check in the manual if the frequencies of your first xorg.conf are supported and switch to a generic monitor model (or change the settings to supported values).
i've checked the specifications on the web and they are ok.. but to make sure, i made them use smaller values.. i tested this config and it displayed fine but when i restarted i got a black screen again..
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