Somebody please help!!!


On my laptop, I have Win XP installed on NTFS. I installed Mandrake 9.1 in the unpartitioned space and rebooted. On reboot, the boot choice menu (which prompts whether you want to boot Linux or "failsafe" or Windows) appears, right?

Well, on my desktop computer it did. On my laptop computer, that particular menu was terribly garbled. It's not an installation error, since I found out where the menu entry for Windows would be by trial and error (pressed Down Arrow three times then Enter = Windows XP). Perhaps it's cos of my 32 MB integrated Savage4 Pro DDR graphics, that this particular screen was garbled.

So I guess I'll have to use a boot-menu program (is it called a Boot Manager?) to replace the Mandrake boot menu. Does anyone know a good boot-menu program I can use for this case? I'll be very grateful for any suggestions

I hope you can understand my description of the problem - pictures were never easy to draw with words.



Faithfully,


Ken.

My guess would be that you have either the graphics card or the monitor screen configured wrong on your laptop Mandrake system.

Guess your way into booting into Linux. If the screen displays OK after you finishing booting then the problem is the screen description given to grub which can be fixed by editing grub. If the screen is still messed up after booting Mandrake then you should reinstall and pay careful attention to what you tell Mandrake about your screen and video card (or correct Mandrake's incorrect auto configuration).

I also notice that you have SuSE 8.2 available. You might try installing SuSE on the laptop and see if it gets your configuration right.

Thanks, jailbait.

SuSE 8.2 works fine in that respect. No problems whatsoever getting it to work with my 32 MB Savage Pro DDR integrated graphics.

The thing is, after I guess my way into booting into Mandrake, the graphics become fine. Just that single boot screen is garbled.

I'll have to find out what GRUB is and how I can access it.... lol. Anyone mind telling me what GRUB is and a few tips on how to use it?

grub is your bootloader. It is the program that you tell which OS to boot and then grub boots it for you.

I don.t use grub but I think that you have to edit a file called grub.conf which may be in /boot or perhaps /etc. The parameter that you are looking to change is called vga=.

Thank you jailbait.

I messed around with Mandrake Control Center, succeeded in setting GRUB as my bootloader, and now everything's fine. I was previously using LILO, which was garbled.

Thanks again for giving me the hint.