Attempting to install Mandrake 9.1 on a pII hp vectra. The installation seems to go smoothly except I get red "unconfigured" letters next to Sound Card and Video at the end of the installation.


When I reboot I get the lovely scrolling text but next nothing but a lonely white cursor on a black screen. Keyboard is unresponsive. Tried installing several times with slightly different variations all leads me to this black void with a white blip.

I'm guessing I'm short a video driver.

Could someone get me started on troubleshooting this?

did you click on the video config button at the end of installation?

that should be where mandrake will help you setup your gui

make sure you know what kind of video card you use and what your monitor frequencies are (horizontal and vertical sync)

Does the white blip move when the mouse is moved? What happens with ctrl-alt-F1/F7? What happens with ctrl-alt-backspace? What happens when right click mouse, double click, middle click? All a bit idiotic, but worth a try, perhaps.

Thanks for the input. I'll try all varieties when I get back the box tonight. I may even sit my 1 year old in front of it and let him come up with random key combinations to get the cursor to do anthing.

I'll bet proper video config will do it, but I haven't opened the hood yet to look at the card and BIOS is password protected (it's a loaner).

Other comments appreciated.

An update:

Reset BIOS using switch board jumpers so I could get into setup. PNP was disabled as required. All else in setup looks fine

Got all specs on my HP Vectra VL6 MT series 8.
Identified Video Card...integrated Matrox Millenium G200 (8MB)
Monitor is an HP Super VGA 1024i (product #D2804B)

Both of these recognized by Mandrake 9.1 during reinstallation.
Installation seems to be successful but again on reboot..........nothing but a white cursor on a blank screen...none of the recommended key combinations achieve any results.

So I tried installing both windows 98 and W2K...neither CD was able to boot into Windows setup...I get the same barren screen with nothing but an unresponsive cursor. Yes, boot order was set to boot from CD.

Oddly I am able to boot into Mandrake 9.1 setup from CD, but as before after going through a 41 minute carefully configured install I get nothing on reboot at the end.

Any ideas on next steps? I am planning to run diagnostics on the Vectra and try Linux install on another box.