I just tried installing madrake 9.1 the other day. The installation went fine, and everything looks correct but when I boot into linux, it tries to load X, the screen turns to the blue background and then flashes a few times and reverts to the text console login screen. After I login and try to run 'startx', the blue screen returns and asks me what desktop i want to use, I chose KDE. then everything disappears except for the blue background and the pointer changes back and forth between the watch and the arrow. Anyways, i have run XFdrake and checked my video settings and I believe they are correct.

I have a dual boot system, with 2 6 gb harddrives, one with windows 98 and one with linux.
my system:
celeron 400Mhz
Aopen Motherboard
230Mb RAM
Crappy S3 Trio3D Agp video card

thanks for any help anyone can provide

well you can try a couple of things...first when you do that startx and have an option to select, did you try selecting something else, just to see if it was just KDE or not?
also did you try running the X Configurator again, cause maybe your monitors horizontal and vertical frequencies were probed incorrectly, or maybe your video card was also...if you do resort to doing the x configuration again if my first thought was wrong, the make sure you have your monitors info on hand for you can manually enter it if its default settings are wrong, and make sure you also know what your video card can output (resolution && color depth) and what amount of video ram it has...

Did you checksum the cds before and after burning then, if installed via cd?

Thanks fpr the help guys, I tried using Gnome and it worked. The only problem is that when I login as Root, it automatically picks KDE and then hangs... how would i go about trying to fix KDE?

thanks