I have an Inspiron 8200 and have been running Slackware on it for the last year or so. About a month ago, for some mysterious reason, my hard drive completely crashed. I managed to salvage the important files by booting off of a KNOPPIX CD. After salvaging the files, I completely wiped the entire hard drive and reinstalled Slack 10.0 from the CD's.

Now, here is the problem. While I was using the KNOPPIX CD, when my computer would boot, it would display any console (non-X) screens using the max resolution of my laptop (1600x1200). So obviously, any text screens would be very small and in the center of my laptop screen. This didn't bother me much at the time.

However, when I reinstalled Slack 10.0, this problem seemed to follow me along. Now, when I start the laptop, the Dell POST screen along with all of the normal start-up messages appear in a tiny 640x480 console window inside the 1600x1200 resolution of the monitor. I can start X Windows just fine and it looks great. But, if I kill X or switch to an alternate virtual console while I am within X, it still stays at that tiny resolution.

I do have framebuffer support compiled into my kernel and the oddball thing about all of this is that if I go into my BIOS setup (by pressing F2 during the Dell POST screen), resolution is magically restored and the subsequent boot sequence is correctly displayed in the correct size. Until the next time I boot the laptop.

So the question is...what the hell did KNOPPIX do and how can I fix it? It's good to know that I have a workaround for now, but I'd really like to correct this. I've looked through my BIOS settings and nothing apparent is jumping out at me.