My fedora 2 computer, will only boot to xterm. it was working fine last night, now it only boots to xterm.

please tell me what i can do

Do you actually mean xterm, or do you mean it's running in console mode? As the name implies, xterm is a terminal emulator that brings up a console in a window in X, so you need to be running in GUI mode for it to work. I'm guessing this isn't actually what you mean.

What was the last thing you did before the computer stopped working as you wanted? It is highly unlikely that it changed by itself. Did you install some updates or new drivers or anything? Do you get any error messages on the console? We need more information before we can help you.

it boots up, i get a blank background, and a small terminal window.

the last thing I did was install the SDL development libraries.

Any ideas? I'd be willing to reinstall, but I CAN'T lose some of my data. please help!!

You might be able to start a window manager from the xterm. Try typing in gnome or whatever wm you use. If it works then you can put that command in your .xinitrc file to start it automatically.

I rebooted, watched the information during boot up.

When its says stuff like,
Starting NFS, it "failed" on the very last program it tried to start.
It changes screens so fast, i can't see what its saying,

Try looking at the end of your boot log. You can see this by typing 'dmesg' in xterm.

hmm, nothing in that log looks like what I saw during boot up, is there maybe another boot log?

I need to get this fixed soon. I'm thinking about reinstalling, but i CAN NOT lose some of the data. can i partition the hard drive, and install on the new partition to protect the data on the original partition?

There are a bunch of logs in /var/log.

Did you try starting a wm from the xterm? Can you start other programs from it?

Installing on another partition is certainly possible, if you have enough free space. Use resize2fs (if you have an ext3 partition, can't remember the name for reiser though) to shrink the filesystem first, then you delete the partition in cfdisk and make a new one starting at the same spot but ending sooner so it's smaller. qparted might be easier, haven't used it myself though. It seems like overkill for something that sounds like a misconfigured .xinitrc though...

Thanks. I found the boot log.

It says "mdmpd" failed during the boot.

hopefully with some information on whats going on, someone out there might have a better idea of how I can get this fixed.

I greatly appreciate everyones help.