Through searches, I've found only a few others with the same problem, but as far as I know it hasn't been resolved yet. This one's a toughie..

I have a nVidia card (GForce2) which was working perfectly with self-compiled nVidia drivers with RedHat 8. I decided the other day to wipe my system clean and start fresh with RH9. X ran perfectly, and I went to nvidia.com to get drivers. I first installed the IA32 drivers via the .run script, and was told it installed perfectly. Made the necessary changes to XF86Config (There was only one, actually -- glx module was already in the file, and GLcore & dri were not, so I just switched "nv" to "nvidia"), rebooted. Everything went well until X loaded. Screen blacked, then just wrote a bunch of garbage text to the screen. X halted, so there was no CTRL-ALT-DEL or anything like that. Before I learn how to change runlevel at boot time in GRUB, I had to telnet in to my machine to fix the problem.

My next try was to uninstall the drivers and compile my own. I got the tarball for the glx and kernel nvidia 4349 drivers. make install successful on both, make sure XF86Config is set up properly, reboot, garbage. Same deal.

My XF86Config File: http://www.magicbytom.com/linuxhell/XF86Config.txt
/var/log/XFree86.0.log after failed X boot: http://www.magicbytom.com/linuxhell/garbageboot_log.txt

Any suggestions are welcome. And if you are running RH9 with a nice, working graphics card, please let me know what you're using just in case I'm forced to switch cards. I'd kindof like to stick with my nVidia, though.. Unreal Tournament 2003 doesn't work without it, I've heard

Thanks for reading!
~MagicTom

-----------------------------------
I will never get frustrated. When I throw my shoe at the computer, it's really a sign of love.

From the log looks like it cannot get useable refresh rates for your monitor (hsync out of range). You'll need to look up your monitor hsync and vsync settings and specify them in the /etc/XF86Config-4. According to the log your display was set to 340x270mm

I'm having the exact same problem right now, except I'm new to this and have no idea how to get past the screwed up screen. I just installed the NVidia driver, then I (idioticly) went and reset the inittab file to boot the X server because I didn't know any other way to start it up. Now it freezes when the X server tries to load, and I can't do anything but reboot. I've tried CTRL-ALT-Delete, CTRL-ALT-Backspace, CTRL-ALT-F1 -> F12, nothing works.

Can anyone tell me how to get past this? I've only been using Linux for a few days, and I'm not doing so well.

I've got Redhat 9.0,
GForce 4 Ti4200,
Epox mobo w/ NForce2 chipset,
Creative Sound Blaster Live Audigy card,
AMD Duron 1.0Ghz,
896Mb Ram,
Sterling Communications 56k Win/Linmodem and
no idea what to do.

I'm not on a network, so I won't be able to use Telnet.

HELP!

You can boot up from grub in run level 3
When grub is up press e, select the kernel line press e and add a " 3" at the end without the quotation marks.

Once logged in use vi to edit your XF86Config file back to what it was.

Personally I've never had any problems with the Nvidia drivers once I had them installed and the XF86Config file edit correctly, but I have had these sort of problems before I got it right.

Thanks, that got my computer working again, now I just have to get the new drivers going.

You can often find out the problem by checking the /var/log/XFree86.0.log to see where the error is.

You need to be su to do this.

su

cat /var/log/XFree86.0.log

post the log file here if it contains errors and someone may be able to help

also you need the right version of the nvidia drivers for your kernel. If it hasnt been d/l then the new .bin dirver will d/l and install it, but this may not work properly if you are not connected to the internet.

I FIXED IT!!!!!

It wasn't the refresh rate, sync, or resolution.. The reason all of those rejected refresh rates were in my file is because the monitor couldn't use that rate with the listed res. Once it found a match, it went with it.. which is perfectly normal.

If you're reading this and have this problem, I'll bet you're using a USB mouse. I was too. I have a Logitech MouseMan Wheel. Back in RH8, you could use this mouse in Linux, but it wouldn't initialize during the install process.. so I plugged in a PS2 mouse for that, and never got around to unplugging it. When I put RH9 in, I took it out. Turns out the nVidia drivers can't handle being initialized with a USB device as your CorePointer! Here's how I fixed it:

Take a PS2 mouse, & plug it in. Start Linux, let kudzu find the new hardware & install it. Your USB mouse *won't* work at this point, but the PS2 will. Open up your /etc/X11/XF86Config (or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, depending on your distro) file, and scroll down until you start seeing sections labeled "InputDevice". Look for the first one that has:

Driver "mouse"

in it. Now check out the line that says

Option "Protocol" "<other text>"

if <other text> is "PS/2", look for another section that uses Driver "mouse". If it says anything else for Option "Protocol" (mine says "IMPS/2"), take note of what's in quotes after the word "Identifier" in that section. Got it? Great, now scroll back up to the top of the file, where it says

Section "ServerLayout"

and directly after the line that ends with "CorePointer", add this line:

InputDevice "devicename" "AlwaysCore"

but instead of "devicename", put exactly what appeared next to the word "Indentifier" for your USB mouse that we looked at earlier.

Save the file, reboot. If your USB mouse works, take the ball out of your PS/2 mouse and tuck it away in a drawer or something. It'll screw you up if the ball moves in the mouse or if a button is clicked, but it has to stay connected to your machine or your nVidia drivers won't install. They just need to see a PS/2 device before they see a USB device for some unknown reason. Your nVidia drivers should install flawlessly now, as long as you make the changes nVidia instructs you to make to that XF86Config (-4) file.

Enjoy! Let me know how it turned out. It certainly got a lot of stress off of my back when I found the solution

Just for good measure, the following is a link to my /etc/X11/XF86Config file as an example:

http://www.magicbytom.com/linuxheaven/working.txt

Over and out, with a big sigh of relief
~MagicTom

Well, I tried all that, and nothing worked. Just spent 2 hours with one mouse, two mice, zero mice, uninstalling, reinstalling, etc, and I'm much better at using emacs, but the nvidia drivers still won't work for me. I'm gonna try reinstalling RH, maybe it'll work then.

I use nvidia and my core is a usb mouse, never had any problems. I have been using the nvidia stuff sence there first driver release on all my systems. the problem is probably with redhat and usb mouse in nvidia, usb and nvidia are both modules, try creating your own kernel then see if it still happens (use kernel.org sources not redhat ones)
for those with problems like this the redhat utils can often be a problem, utilities are nice for some people (I hate them) but they won't work for everyone, 2 people with exact same machines except for 1 minor detail (bios version etc) can have completely different results.

I use slackware 8.1 crossed with slack 9.0 plus custom kernel, self compiled glibc, and gcc