I've been running a redhat 9 box with a nVidia geForce 4 ti4400 card for about 3 months now. It has been flawless, no problems, not even a bit of turbulance... until today...

I had been running everything fine. Rebooted, and bam, when X tries to start back up, I get an error. X can not start. Failed to initalize the nVidia device! Wtf?! I try to reinstall the nVidia drivers. No luck. I push the card in harder to make sure it was making full contact, etc.

I look back to what I've recently done to my system (removed 2 NIC cards, which I replaced both of). Swapped my CDROM / DVD drives (still haven't changed back yet).

I reboot a few more times, this is when I notice when "checking for new hardware" it prints ^[[18 ^[[18 (or something very similar... I think I'm forgetting a character) I have no idea what that means, or why I started getting it, but could it be the problem?

Also, X runs just fine with the generic nvidia drivers, but then my games don't work so well. I really don't want to have to reinstall redhat.

Thanks in advance for any help.

well first off, that is weird for something like this to just happen ...
so when you did try to re-install the drivers are you uninstalling the drivers before reinstalling them ?
and as of them characters, thats usually similiar to what is printed to the screen if you mistakenly hit a key on your keyboard during a boot ... reboot again and hit a key again and you'll see ;-)
as of when you re-install the drivers, what does the error say exactly ...
and when you do re-install check the /var/log/nvidia-installer.log to see if everything went as planned ...
and also when (and if) you do get the error, look in the /var/log/XFree86.0.log file to see if there is more of a detailed error in there ...

no errors in any of those logs. No I didn't uninstall first. I don't know how (I'm still a linux newbie). As for the ^[[18 character, I'm POSITIVE I haven't hit any keys, it happens EVERY time it says "checking for new hardware" and it's prints that 2x.

How do I uninstall the drivers? I will try that.

Thanks!

Ok, I just uninstalled, and reinstalled the nVidia drivers. I even tried installing the old drivers. Still no luck. The nv drivers still work, but not the new nVidia drivers (which really ruins my game playing...). I checked all the logs, and everything seems to be running just peachy. I think I'm going to have to reinstall redhat... maybe I'll try a different distro :-/ (ugh!)


*sigh*


EDIT:

I popped my redhat 9 install CD in my drive, and reboot... as my system is booting, I remember playing with the bios settings yesterday (after I had swapped my CD / DVD drives), so I hit del and enter bios setup. I had turned the IRQ allocation for PCI grafix off (I don't have a PCI card, so why would it have mattered? Well, it did. I reboot, and bam, the nice white nVidia screen greets me, followed by X windows. So here's a lesson: Don't disallow the allocation of an IRQ address to PCI video, EVEN IF YOU USE AN AGP card!! I'm still getting the ^[[18~^[[18~ and I'm not pressing any keys, but I'll live with it as long as I don't have any more problems!

Thanks for everyone's help!