I recently installed Fedora Core 4 (i386) onto a compaq presario 7940. I have one hardrive and am dedicating it to Fedora. I did an 'everything' install if it makes a difference. The install went fine, (all media passed and iso's sha1sum's matched) until the reboot. After grub loads, my screen goes black and nothing happens. My hard drive continues to work for 30 seconds or so- then everything halts, although my keyboard still respondes to caps/numLock. I've tried using the "I" (interactive) mode, everything loads ok, until I get to the login, (which I don't even see if i'm not in interactive mode) and if i'm quick enough I can type in my username and password before the screen goes black and enters a state as described above. I have still yet to see the desktop. Any help would be appreciated, keeping in mind I am new to Linux.

Thanks,
Tim

Far from expert here, but you might just be having trouble with booting into a GUI login. I personally never boot to a graphical login until I have done all the tweaking I need to do; I always manually start the GUI after logging in until I'm happy with everything.

One "default" window manager had me fooled into thinking my Xwindows configuration had frozen my system until I accidentally did a right-mouse-click during some troubleshooting. If you are booting directly into a similar window manager, it could mimic the symptoms you describe. To check, do a right-mouse-click on the black screen and see if a menu pops up; if so, then you just have the infamous basic window manager black window.

You should be able to use your install CD to do a "rescue" type boot from the CD and edit the files on your hard drive to change your boot runlevel so that you boot to a command line. Never have done Fedora myself (I'm a Gentoo fan), but this page has a grub edit for Fedora that might help you:

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc4.html

Good luck.

Thanks for the info. It seems Ctrl+Alt+F1 brings my screen back. Still can't get a gui (Gnome) to boot. I will try your suggestion though, as it sounds very logical, and may save me more trouble down the road...

Tim