Nvidia driver problems
 

I have fedora 9 installed and I am using Nvidia's drivers, it was the only way I could get Compiz working so I could use AWN. Anyways my computer hung up and I restarted it, and now Linux wont boot completely. My computer starts and then the Nividia logo flashes on screen, it tries to load the log on screen, but just flashes back to the Nvidia logo, and is stuck in a loop doing this.

I was thinking about booting into a terminal, and then disabling the driver, to see if it will boot all the way. But I have no idea how to do that.

hi, you may try pressing "I" during the boot process, which usually switches to interactive boot, there you can select what services to start. You may also try pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 to switch into a terminal, but knowing that the logo is continuously flashing, it probably won't work.

Once in a terminal, open the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file (using nano or vi) and look for any errors.

Well, if you have an option to safe-boot, choose that. If you don't, let it boot normally until the Nvidia logo-loop. When you are there, press "CTR + ALT + F1". That will drop you into a console. Login as root and do this:
You've just created a backup of your xorg.conf file. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf with you preferred text editor (ex: vim, pico, mcedit, nano, etc).

When you have /etc/X11/xorg.conf open, search for "drivers", under the "Device" category. It should look similar to this:

What you want to do here is to change "nvidia" to "nv" and restart (you don't have to restart, but let's keep this simple). To shutdown:

shutdown -r now

You should not get stuck on that logo loop now, but you won't have 3D accelerated graphics. The objective here is to see if the drivers are the ones causing trouble.

You could also take a look at your /var/logs directory to see if you can find clues to what is wrong.

Good luck!

That did not work. When in the terminal it would disappear every time the loop would begin again, and I would have to go back in to it. I edited xorg.conf multiple times, and every time I restarted my computer it would continue to loop with the nvidia logo and the driver would be set back to nvidia.

That is not so good. Could you post the contents of the following files here:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf
/var/log/Xorg.0.log

They should contain some clues that we need.

Hi, Since you can't boot, I suggest you use a liveCD to do this.

Another thing you might want to try is changing the default init level. To do that, press "e" when in grub (having selected your fedora distro), select the kernel line, press "e" again and append "1" to the line. Then just press enter and boot by pressing 'b'. Then you might want to install some kind of command line web browser (lynx).

Serafean

I have managed to get a copy of the xorg.conf and the Xorg.0.log.

Here is the xorg.conf
When ever I change the driver to nv save and restart it is back to nvidia.

Here is a link to the xorg.0.log file. It is really long and I did not want to post the whole thing.

Quick question when I booted with a live CD, xorg.conf would not show up when I was browsing the file system. Was there a reason for this.

It might simply have been non-existant, from what I understand, the xorg.conf is generated at boot by the livna configuration system. try running this : in a chroot (your / partition becomes any directory you chose in the selected shell)