I dualboot between Mandrake 9.1 and Windows XP constantly without any problems. The other day, I bought a new video card and some more memory. Now, mandrake goes straight to a black screen when I try to boot to it, and when I put in the install cd and boot to it, I get the main menu, but when I select "install or upgrade," I get the same black screen, and the 'caps lock' and 'scroll lock' lights on the keyboard blink. The memory I put in is 512mb pc2700, and the memory I already had in there was 2x 256mb pc2100, not sure if this would do anything. The video card is a GeForce FX 5600 w/ 256mb. The video card I used to have was a GeForce2 ti w/ 64mb, and it worked great.

Can you use F1 to enter the 'more options' part of setup in the first setup dialogue? Among other things this will give you the ability to have a text-based install which would otherwise be hidden by the graphical setup, and you will then be able to see an error message before the system stalls (my bet is on a kernel panic - seen a couple of them but can't actually say how to remove them yet )

Robin

The RAM may be bad, and your X86Config-4 file is probably not set to your new card.

I tried the text install and reinstalled the kernel, and it all works again! Thanks for the quick replies! Now if I can only get my sound card to work in linux

Well, I'm right back where I started, when I rebooted, it started doing the same thing all over again Anymore ideas as to why it won't boot?

In terms of installing Mandrake 9.1 on a computer with 1gb or more memory - it can cause frame buffer trouble with certain video cards - giving those symtoms you mentioned in the first post - Personally I would re-install Mandrake from scatch - in doing so press F1 and type

linux vga=0

This might set the relevant "options" up at the start and hopefully aviod any problems later. (also probably not important but your new memory is rated at a different speed to the previous memory - not sure whether this is an issue?)

for your video card, make sure u reinstall the nvidia drivers just to make sure all is well

also, like the other posts have said, 1 gig or more of memory can be a pain in linux right now: either consider taking out one of the 256 meg sticks or do one of the following commands: vga=0 or mem=880

as for sound, what kind of sound card is it?

My sound card is SoundBlaster Live! 5.1. When I reinstall Mandrake, what size do you recommend I make my / partition, /usr partition, and swap partitions on a 20gb hard drive? Also, is there a way i can save my network configuration that I currently have on Mandrake, because I'm still very new to linux, and it was a real pain setting it up, not sure i remember how to either...

well, soundblaster live should be well compatible with linux and there may even be linux drivers (there should be a sound configuration tool in mandrake, use that and see if u can get linux to detect it)

for your / partition, try making it 4-6 gigs so u have plenty of room to install packages, try out a few small apps and then maybe some larger ones like vmware (which will let you run windows within linux) or winex (which may let you run some advanced windows-based games)

your swap should be twice your ram, if u don't want to waste hdd space on that, u don't have to; with mem=880, u should have not hard times with amount of ram

also, there is no need to separate your /usr partition, don't do it

/boot can be separates (and i recommend u do so in case u try other distros and don't want to have complications then) and should be about 100 megs

as for saving network config, sry, no info here