Screenshot

Attached Thumbnails

 

Gotta head into work now. I'll reboot again and leave it as is until I get back tonight...haha hopefully it will at least show the login screen.

diagnosing problems can be fun

first look for the normal everyday things

and this sticks out
a 80 gig drive

they were popular back in 2001

so a 12 year or so old drive is likely the the problem

so the drive needs to be tested

gparted can do that for formatting it to ext4

how many bad sectors are on it is a good indication of the state of the drive
( most of the time )

1 members found this post helpful.

Yeah it is pretty fun. Sometimes frustrating too. I remember once I threw -- actually no we're not going there.
Hahah
So pulled out a 1 TB drive, formatted it, installed SuSE 13.1 on it, it rebooted, and now I'm at a gray background and have been here for over 10 minutes. I'm able to ctrl+alt+F6 to tty6 and login via command line. I'll have to figure out how to launch the GUI...but I'm wondering if it will work at all considering tty7 is just hanging there at the gray background. I'm using the only good stick of RAM I have left, and am using a new(er) drive. Will have to scan this for errors I suppose.

Looking at the two screenshots, this is as far as my bootup process gets. I can select OpenSuSE or advanced options. Once I select OpenSuSE it shows me the wallpaper you see in the second shot. After about 10 seconds it disappears and all you have left is a gray screen.

I hit ctrl+alt_f6, logged in as root, and ran an extended offline smart test on the 1 TB drive that I just installed SuSE on. It took a couple hours to run. No errors were found. So the drive is ok, and my RAM is ok. Should I be running a CPU test or is this even hardware-related? When I ctrl+alt+f7 back to my main screen, I still have a gray background. Is there a command I can run that will tell me what's going on? Surely something has frozen.

Attached Thumbnails

   

Alright, I can get onto my desktop by going through recovery mode. Everything seems just fine. What does this mean? I'm guessing that in recovery mode, a limited set of drivers are loaded, so therefore if it's fine in recovery mode, then a hardware device was interfering with the normal boot process?

have you hit the < esc> button during the GUI boot up to look at the boot text

where is it stopping at ?
the network is a common issue
( if you are trying to use a Microsoft usb dongle to connect to the net -- you might have a problem )
now
during the install did you do everything default ?
as in there is NO root user and no separate root password

only sudo using the first non root users password
--did you get past the VERY first boot where you set the ?
time
date
non root users

or

did you set up a separate root password from the first non root user


and is this a ATI graphics card
or a laptop chip
if this is an intell CPU/GPU chip
a amd/ATI cpu/gpu chip?
you might need a extra driver

or is it a nvidia "optimus" chip ?
that will need Bumblebee

or is it a real AMD or Nvidia 3d card

Here's a screenshot to show where it's stopping at.
I hit esc during GUI boot as you suggested.
When it gets to the last line in the screenshot, the screen goes black for a second, and then it goes gray and it stays there.
Nothing else happens.
I'm using the built in ethernet on the motherboard.
During the install, I didn't do anything special; just changed the following:

-Time Zone
-Custom partitioning: no LVM
-4096 mb swap, 120 mb /boot, 80 gb / and remainder is /home.
-I put in a username and password.
-I told it that it will be the same password as the administrator.
-Did not create a separate root user.

I found my hardware specs:
AMD FX-8150 X8 3600MHZ 16MB 125W AM3+
Corsair Vengeance 8GB PC12800 DDR3
Samsung 22X DVDRW SATA OEM
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AMD 990FX AM3+
Radeon HD 5770.

Attached Thumbnails

 

AMD drivers

It was my graphics card. As soon as I removed it and swapped for an ATI Radeon HD Pro 2600 I believe it was, it booted up no problem. I just don't understand why it was working just fine when I first installed it.

As the last resort, you could try to attach the old ATI card again and try to run the kernel with the "nomodeset" parameter.
In case you didn't know how to do that, this is the way

Hope that helps

I still think it's the driver

Why's that?

Linx and AMD don't love each other. Graphics cards give indication that they are going bad. I worked in the live environment.

I don't personally agree. Have had ATI couple of times and it worked well. Any practise experience to support your thesis?