When the hurricane blew through my area, it brought down alot of power lines and there were outages across the land. I was, at the time, in X. The power went out and my computer went with it. Unrelatedly, I moved across town. When I hooked up my computer (same computer, periphials) my computer would (and still does) freeze when I startx. The numlock LED won't light when I hit it, so ctrl-alt-bkspce or anything else is useless.

I searched high and low on this, and found no help. Logs say nothing unusual. I tried on one vc doing:

$>sleep 200; killall -9 xdm; killall -9 xinit;

and on another startx, to no avail (even after an hour).

Tried out different card drivers (GEForce). Recompiled the NVIDIA driver, tried kernels 2.4.18, 20, 22, 26-beta. Re-installed XFree86-4.3.0. Still, nothing. I am at the end of my line, browsing with lynx.

Please help, I can't live without X forever (just because of games and porn, you understand).

Take a look in lost+found to see if fsck placed any files there.

no, no files ..... thanks for the suggestion though. any other things I could try? I did pray to it, and dance around it with a dead chicken, but to no avail.

Do you have the exact same symptoms for user and root?

You could put some echo commands in the startx , /home/user/.xinitrc and /root/user/.xinitrc scripts to try to find where the logic is failing. Something like:

echo "location 1" >> /var/debug.x.log

Maybe some files got corrupted?

Yes, I think that's what happend. My first guess was a lockfile issue, but I don't really know much about x windows and it's lockfiles....

Yes, same results with root. I will try the echo statements and see where it's failing ....

By the way, I found that for some reason, my BIOS settings had changed. I don't know if the surge caused that or what, but I suspect it contributes to the problem. Even so, I have re-compiled and re-installed X.

"my BIOS settings had changed."

People sometimes get probems with X similiar to yours when the X configuration file, /etc/X11/XF86Config, is configured wrong. This file contains setting for some of your hardware - mouse, keyboard, video card, and monitor. It is conceivable that if your BIOS settings for one of these devices has changed that /etc/X11/XF86Config now is misconfigured enough to cause X to fail.

okay, I think I'm completly screwed now. I've gone to extreme measures! I flashed my BIOS, reset the settings I wanted (not exactly the ones I had), and removed X from my system (after I downloaded the 4.3.0 binaries). re-installed. still it freezes.

I deleted anything having to do with X ... /etc/X11* /usr/X* /var/X* ~/.X* EVERYTHING. I even freaked out and deleted evertything under /tmp. Still, nothing. I have forked (yes, forked) with every XF86Config setting. I even ran xf86config a few times.

STILL! I get a black screen. Nothing helps! And I can't get the latest slackware cause there's no bittorrent client on the command-line!

if anyone has any more advice (much thanks for the help thus far) or just wants to point out that I'm screwed, please feel free

I think that it is time to install from your Slackware install CD.