Suddenly unable to start X server - Fedora 7 and NVIDIA
 

I have a dual boot configuration that had previously been working well here.

Some details:
-- Fedora 7 32-bit and x86-64, on separate partitions.
-- NVIDIA driver: NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-169.12-pkg2
-- Running dual screen "TwinView" mode

Out of the blue, when I went to boot into x86-64 this afternoon, X Windows failed to load.

xorg.conf has been unchanged for months, and is identical between 32-bit and 64-bit versions. My 32-bit setup continues to boot correctly. The 64-bit partition was working fine earlier this week, and today it fails to load.

The last 3 lines of the error screen read:

and that's it!

If I attempt to reconfigure from this point, I enter my root password, and the screens go blank. The only way I can tweak anything is by setting inittab to 'id:3:initdefault' or by accessing files via my 32-bit version.

I have reinstalled the drivers, switched back to single screen, and tried switching back to default VESA drivers.

I have Xorg.0.log and xorg.conf available for review, if necessary. My matching 32-bit version is running perfectly, so I can also easily compare files between operating systems.

I'm relatively new to linux, so I'd appreciate any suggestions you can offer. Thanks!

This reeks of some sort of hardware failure, but exactly which hardware I don't know. If I were to put my finger on it, I'd say something in your driver software on the hard drive got corrupted (bad seek followed by write?), but unless you're running Tripwire or have a stack of md5 sums of everything on your drive(s), there's no way to know. Another possibility is a failure of some memory cells.

I just reread the 2nd to last line you wrote and it's not right: you can't compare the 32 bit to the 64 bit binaries obviously.

The only suggestion I can give is to re-install, but I can't tell if the problem is in X itself or the NVidia driver, so download and install the latter first (the current version is up to 173 anyway, so call it a driver upgrade) and if that doesn't work, reinstall X from your distro. If neither of those work, you may want to run some hardware diagnostics, starting with using hdparm (or is it smartctl?) to do a low-level non-destructive scan on your hard drive (read the man page for the right options); if scsi (or maybe even sata) make that sdparm.

Good luck! Let us know what you find out!

Mike

I assume the OP meant he could compare configs, not binaries.

Can you please repost the errors - I can't see the RHS

Thanks, Mike (Storkus).

Hardware is something I hadn't given much thought to, but since software hasn't changed, that really is a likely option. I am running hardware RAID on SATA drives, so I'll give it a scan...

Thanks billymayday,

That was exactly what I meant... configurations are very similar between versions, so I can compare my settings.

Sorry, what is "RHS"?

RHS = right hand side

The message is cut off on the right at "undefined symbol: Bui"

Exactly. That's all I have in my console as well! I can't seem to locate this information in any of the logs, so I transcribed it from the screen.