guess this doesnt sound to exciting, but it is a real pain in the backside. Anyway, i recently purchased an old second hand system which i intended to install linux on and proceed to play about with it.

The PC is a slimline machine with everything onboard, sound, video, modem, s-video, usb and lan. The mobo used is a BKMVP4 ver 1.42 manufactured by amptron apparently (a quick search on google revealed this). The processor is an AMD k62-450, 10gb hard drive and 32mb ram, with 4 shared onboard graphics. I went and downloaded the various drivers i thought i would need and i started to installed the distribution of linux i had at the time.

The machine orginally came with win98 and after destroying the partitions with fdisk I started to install linux on the pc. I firstly choose red hat 7.1 and the machine booted, found the cd in the drive correctly and it proceeded to boot from the disc. Then after the first 'splash' screen (where the cd displays RED HAT 7.1 etc in a full screen image) the screen went blank. So after rebotting, I went into the bios and started adjusted the bios so that the pc had 8mb shared graphics. The same problem occurred again. I then purchased another 64mb stick of RAM and installed it, and set the bios to automatically assign a portion of ram to the video. Again the problem didnt solve itself.

So i tried mandrake 8.1 (or whatever the latest version is, pro edition) and the same thing happened.

Then i downloaded suse 7.3 and the samething happened.

finally, i decided to try RH7.0 - guess what happened?? Nothing.

So, in despartation I took the hard drive out of the system and put it into another PC, and installed linux that way - no problems. Then, I removed the drive, and put it back into the orginal pc and booted up only for the same thing to happen.

I had also downloaded the drivers onto the my PC's hard drive and burnt them to cd before starting this all, so i tried to install the required drivers. The download didnt work, so I went and didnt it again and again and again only for the same problem to happen.

I now get the start up screen on suse asking do i want to load linux, linux failsafe or memory test. When i try to run anything, i get a blank screen and nothing happens.

Has anyone got any ideas about solving this problem? I am really running out of ideas here. I cant find any references online to this problem and I am really at a dead end.

help??

Ditch onboard thing once for all - my advice, if there is an available AGP/PCI slot get the appropriate interface video card or get window back on this toy, it's not worth it trying to install linux with X server on this "power rig" of yours, I am not dissing you.

haha my "power rig" uses a AGP voodoo 5500 64mb sdram better than my good comp!