I installed red hat 9.0 and Win2K dual boot with GRUB. Every thing was working fine but the highest resolution I could get was 800 x 600 and I wanted 1024 x 768. My video card is NVIDIA TNT2 w 32 MB. I made a mistake and selected 64MB and now all I get is a black screen instead of a login box.

I have tried to over ride the driver at boot but have had no luck. I was trying to use Xconfigurator but my system proceeds to the GUI and goes black.

1) how can I recover the last video driver setting that was working?

2)how can I switch to command line login instead of graphic?

thanks for your help.

Hi,

You switch to command line login by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Fx, where x is between 1 and 6. The chosen driver and the settings are defined in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. If there is an old config file, it should be in the same directory - /etc/X11 - but if you're lucky, you can clearly see the memory setting in XF86Config-4, or you can run xf86config and set up your screen there. If you're in doubt as to which setting to use at some point, use the old config file as a template.

Bebo,

thanx for your help. I tried the Ctrl+Alt+Fx sequence to switch between GUI and command line. Here is what I see. During boot F1 has no effect while F2-F6 change from boot screen to blank screen with flashing cursor. After the boot sequence is done I see a brief prompt to login local host , but then the bogus video driver takes over and I get a flash of color pixels then a black screen. Further use of the Ctrl+Alt+Fx sequence produces no response. At this point the only way I can regain a response is to power down and reboot. Is there a key stroke sequence (like Ctrl+Alt+Del) to cause a reboot without turning off the power switch?

Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanx

Ctrl+Alt+Fx is only useful when your system is up and running. Well, you're right - if the video driver crashes it is difficult to do anything at all... Hmm, maybe if you had a boot floppy, then you could get access to your computer and exorcise this evil setup. Of course, you can always reinstall the linux system - it sounds as if you've had almost no time to use your machine for anything, so maybe you don't have anything there of your own stuff that you really need? And if you do you can use the very small windows program explore2fs to get your files from the linux partittions and then reinstall.

I was just about to re-install, when I checked this message for one more chance. I do have a boot floppy but the system acts the same way whether booting from floppy or HD. It seems like choosing an incompatible video driver would be a pretty common mistake and therefore I think that re-installing th OS is a pretty drastic fix. Oh well here I go to re-install.

Good luck

well if you are using rh9 then i would think you have the disks for rh9 so you could pop in the first cd and go into rescue mode.