Hi, I have a strange question to ask.

As I wanted to resize my /home and /tmp partitions since I don't have enough space in my /home partition, I used partition magic 8.0 to resize them. Once I am done with the change, I was not able to boot my linux rh 8.0 properly anymore. During booting up, after the screen displays "local login:", while loading the graphical GUI, my computer gets into a loop where it switches between above line of text and dark screen.

I am wondering whether anyone know what's the problem for this scenario. Even after trying the rescue feature of rh 8.0 and checking the file system, it appars everything is alright. Do I have to update any system file after resizing partitions?

Any input will be greatly appreciated.

Allen

I had a similar problem when I resized my linux partition (In my case it was just one partition for all my linux) and lilo would just freakout on me.

I have Mdk, so I used the rescue CD and reinstalled Lilo and that did the trick.

You said you used RH's rescue and checked that the filesystems were ok, did you try to reinstall your bootloader?

Something else to think about, for me, my partitions stayed the same...just different sizes (took 5 gigs off of my hda1 windows to give to hda2 linux) so I just ran lilo and all was well, but it might be more complicated if the drive layout changed.

Hi, thank you for your suggestion.

However, after following your suggestion to reinstall the bootloader, my linux will still cycle between blank screen and the "local login" screen. One thing different between our cases is that I use grub bootloader while you lilo. But I thought that should not make too big a impact in this problem. Wonder you have any other suggestion.

Thanks.

Allen

Sorry, to be honest, I'm at a loss now.

I would have figured the same thing you did, that Grub or lilo would not have a made a difference, simply reinstalling would have done the trick

But what do you mean by it cycles between a blank screen and local login? What local login? I don't understand what you mean.

hi, this is what I mean.

I am not sure about other distrib, for rh 8.0, after displaying all kinds of messages setting up hardware and software, and right before the GUI is loaded, there will be two lines of text displayed on screen and one of them is "local login". I remember it's used for people who prefer textmode over GUI and they can log into their systems using that prompt. Since I use GUI, the promopt will flash for a moment before the GUI is loaded up automatically. For my machine, somehow it will loop nonstop between a blank screen (suppose to be the GUI screen) and the textmode login prompt.

Hopefully this helps.

Allen

Oh ok...I get you.

So if I understand what's going on is that linux IS booting, but the gdm isn't (You're booting by default into X I guess). You can select linux in grub and it goes through its init sequence.

First thing to try is to boot into text mode...(runlevel 3). I'm not certain how you can do that with your install (with my Mandrake, I'd just use the CD in rescue mode and change /etc/inittab to default to runlevel3 and reboot).

However there are ways to specify the level you want from grub or lilo, I just don't know what they are... a quick search should turn up instructions tho.

Once in text mode..login and try "startx" and see if there are any obvious errors showing up. You might want to try "dmesg" too and see if the bootlog shows any errors while booting.

Let me know if that helps.

If you use partitionmagic on winxp, it sometimes goes into
haywiremode,then for some unknown reason, it sometimes
helps to autodetect the hardrive in bios, maybe that will work
in linux too

Hi, sorry that this problem is getting more and more involved. ;-)

Following tcaptain's suggestion, I looked into the /var/log/XFree86.0.log file, there is something related to my problem. In the end of the file, it listed

"Could not init font path. element unix /:7100, removing from list"
"Could not open default font 'fixed'",

It appears that my xwin is not able to start because it can't find the 'fixed' font. But it's kind of messy to find out how linux specify the font directory after I looked into the /etc/x11/XF86Config file.

Any further suggestion.

Thanks again for your help.

Allen

Nonsense, that's the whole point of boards like this no?


Yay! Something I suggested actually HELPED someone! Woohoo! (I'm new at this, bear with me lol)

I don't know a whole lot about that error...so I got curious and did a quick google search and turned up:

this link

The origin of the problem is different, but the cause and symptom seems similar, so maybe the solution (check permisions on /temp directory) might apply.

Its a shot in the dark...