After gettting utterly frustrated with RHL 9 on my old compaq, I started from scratch and now I'm trying Mandrake 9.1 (because 9.2 was taking too long :-P)

Anyway, everything goes fine, perfect, until I get to the point where Iset up the graphical settings, and go to test it... it just goes black, and nothing is displayed.

After the 12 seconds, it goes back, but it simply doesn't like it, and I cant start the GUI at all (darn the CLI)

anyway, the card is a GeForce 2 MX PCI, but it's not DDRbut that's the only thing it has close (GF2 DDR) but the next screen talks about the card, and it says it exactly, but once again when I go to test, it doesn't work.

Please tell me if you need any more information than this...

Wait, so looking around a bit, nVidia cards have problems only with Mandrake 9.1?

And RHL 9 doesn't like to install from a CD ONLY ON COMPAQ PC'S???

What????!!! (What are the chances?)

Don't test. The test thing is buggy. Maybe you'll get away with it that way.

I tried skipping the test too, but alas, it boots up to the point where I imagine pretty graphics are displayed, but all I see is a screen resembling the back of my eyelids.

It shows all the graphics fine during installation though, is there a generic card I can select or somethign else that would work?

Do you get to a command line at least? If not, try
linux failsafe from the boot menu. Then login, become root with the command
su

and then

XFdrake

which will start the video card configuration tool. It's menu driven. As you noticed, since the installer displays fine, there has to be at least one setting that works. First try the one that it selects automatically. Use the command

startx

to start the graphical session. If it does not work, try some other settings in XFdrake. Mabe something like generic vga or vesa will work. Don't know though.

yes the CLI came up, but now I'm reinstalling the entire thing 9mainly because I have nothing else to do) but then I'll try what you said.