Blank Screen on installation
 

Hey all out there, I'm new to Linux, so excuse my ignorance, but I have been having a problem with the installation of Fedora Core 4. I try installing it, but before it even gets to the installer, my screen goes black and stays like this indefinitely unless I restart my computer. I tried the cd and dvd versions to no avail. I also tried booting up with the commands: linux text | linux skipddc | linux resolution=1024x768 | linux acpi=off | linux ide=nodma | linux nofb. None of these settings did anything and the computer still froze after displaying 15 minutes of scrolling white text. This problem seems to be very rare because there haven't been many other people with the same problem, so thank you very much for any help you can give me.

My System:
SATA 200GB Western Digital HD - NTFS for my XP installation
IDE 80GB Western Digital HD - FAT32 for storage
IDE 10GB Maxtor HD - FAT32 for Fedora??
Pentium 3.2GHz Processor
MSI 865PE NEO2-p Motherboard
eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra (AGP 8X) Video Card
Dell Trinitron 17" Monitor (Circa 1998)
2GB of Corsair PC3200 ram, Dual Channel

And your sure the media is okay? Did you run a md5sum on the downloaded files to make sure they matched the published values? Are you able to run the media check during the installation process, or does it not all you to get that far?

I wasn't able to run a md5sum on the files through the installation, but I could probably do this while I'm running XP. How do you do run a md5sum? Also, I tried installing with the DVD and CD's, they both gave me the same problem.

I think Fedora uses Sha1sum hash for verification. If you google md5 or Sha1sum, you'll be able to find windoze apps to do them.

Welcome, and good luck--remember to have fun, too.

I downloaded fsum.exe and used that to verify the sha1 checksum of the .iso image file. It checked out perfectly with the one on the fedora website so my problem isn't with the iso file. Maybe I am burning the image wrong, I have used Alcohol 120 and Nero so far. Is there a special way to do burn the image file or certain programs I should use?

I don't use Windows anymore, so I can't really help you there. But, in some sense, yes, you have to burn it in a "special" way in the sense that you need to specify that it's a bootable image. If your computer boots from the CD, then that is likely a non-issue.

Have you tried booting a live CD (e.g. Knoppix or the Ubuntu live CD)? Do those give you the same problem?

I have booted successfully using Knoppix 4.0, so my computer can run linux. What about installing an earlier version of Fedora and then upgrading to 4.0 after I get to the desktop? Does anyone know of any good mirror sites to dl earlier versions of Fedora?

You could definitely try an earlier version of Fedora. It would be interesting to see if the problem is duplicated. However, I have personally had quite a few problems with the built-in upgrade feature. If nothing else, though, you can take a look at an xorg.conf file for a working installation and find where the broken one is going wrong.

I tried out Fedora core 3 and it almost worked. I got through the install all the way until when it said performing post install configuration and then it froze. In both the graphical and text interfaces it would bring up the post install screen and freeze about half way through. To make sure that it was freezing up, I let it run all night. Next morning, it was still at the post install. Any suggestions?

I'm beginning to think this is a hardware error. Your motherboard or video card may be crapping out. I had similar experiences with installation troubles for a little while, and I tracked the problem down to a flaky mother board. Replacing the mother board solved the problem.

Try Knoppix or any of the other live CDs and see if those work. Otherwise, start swapping hardware components (assuming you have components around that you can use) and see if that solves your problems.

After some frustrating configuration, this is my first post from Knoppix. While my computer runs Knoppix, it doesn't do it very well. For one, my usb devices are very laggy so I am forced to use my old PS2 mouse and keyboard. Also, I couldn't boot right off the DVD, in either of my drives. Instead I had to copy the KNOPPIX folder off the DVD onto my Maxtor hard drive in Windows, then boot from the DVD and load from the hard disk. This may be the problem with Fedora also, it has trouble reading from my optical drives, so maybe I could copy the Fedora folder onto my Maxtor harddrive and try booting from that, if that is even possible. Unfortunatually for me, I have no other parts to swap out, so software configuration doesn't work then thats it. Any suggestions? In the meantime I will be trying out my idea. Thanks for the help so far Mad Scientist, I probably would have given up a long time ago if it wasn't for you.

Copying files to hard disk then booting didn't work, the installation still froze at the exact same spot. I'm running out of ideas and a different distro is looking pretty good right now.