Hello everybody.

I've had this problem a couple of times and on a number of different machines. Sometimes I got rid of it by tweaking here and there, but up to now I don't know its true origin.

When I boot RedHat Linux 8, everything is fine until X attempts to change the screen resolution to enter the graphical mode. I can hear the ticking sound when the monitor changes the resolution, but then nothing happens for 2 or 3 seconds, the screen remains blank. This happens another 4 or 5 times, and I'm dropped back to text mode. Then, the whole thing starts all over again. I could let it run like this for hours if I wanted, no timeout occurs.

Unfortunately, I cannot interrupt the process from outside: All keys are ignored except for text mode, where I can type, say, 3 characters before the next resolution switch occurs and further key hits are ignored.

The whole system was working properly till yesterday. I've added some harddisks, and even got the system running without problems. The last change I can remember was adding a swap partition.

Nasty side-effect: I have to unplug my harddisks and change the BIOS settings etc. in order to get the system booted from a CD-ROM, since all IDE ports are now in use by HDDs.

I've already checked the X log files (no errors) and created a new X86 config. Problem persists.

Any suggestions?


Thank you very much!!


Danny

When booting, LILO or Grub, get to the command line mode, on it type:

Linux single

That'll boot you to single user mode, use an editor, like pico, to change the line in:

/etc/inittab

That looks like this:

id:5:initdefault:

To look like this:

id:3:initdefault:

That'll start you in good old console mode and keep X from constantly trying to restart.

Kick the machine up to multiuser mode with:

init 3

Then reconfigure X, start with letting it try to do it itself, without the annoyance of RH's annaconda:

X -configure

That'll create a version of XF86Config that it'll tell you how to test (in order to end the test, if it works... ctrl+alt+backspace), if the test doesn't work it'll just croak out anyway. If its useable,

cp /root/XF86Config.new /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

I think RH is still using -4... hope so at least, cut it off the filename if there isn't one already there.

To get X going:

startx

Offhand, what video card is giving you this kind of grief?

Cheers,

Finegan

The video card is a Diamond Viper 550, Riva TNT chipset.

finegan - you are my hero of the day.

Thanks a lot.

The machine is now running again.

In the meantime I had managed to log on to the machine from a notebook (via SSH), so the changes were all hacked in pretty quickly.

Apparently, in RedHat 8, the default filename for the X config file for X, has no "-4" at the end. It's just "/etc/X11/XF86Config".

Wow. I can't believe it. This problem kept me busy for so long. Thanks again.

danny