Whoopsie! I was doing so well - got sound working, got dual screens working, watched a film on it last night, really starting to enjoy mandrake&me. Should've kept my hands in my pockets!

As root, I altered my resolutions using yanc, but must've made a typo and chosen a dud resolution or something, because now I just boot to the command line. If I log in and type X <return> it tells me that
"no modes remaining for display device TV-0
Aborting
Screens found but none have a usable configuration."

Now, I'm making good progress with linux mandy9.0 but I'm not 133t enough to work without the GUI yet! How should I go about putting it back in a working setup?

Try loggin in as root and run:
XFdrake
(I think that is the correct case)

Thanks for the quick reply.
I ran XFDrake and set the display to 800x600 16bit plug&play monitor, and upon going "test" the program said:
"Nvidia(0): No modes remaining for display advice TV-0
Aborting
Try to change some parameters."

To further explain what I did to break it:
I had used Yanc to set up one monitor and one television to both be on 800x600. I had tweaked the resolution successfully a few times, and each time I'd verified all the other settings at the same time (e.g. TV0:CRT/LCD/TV? TV1:CRT/LCD/TV? Refresh rates etc)

This time I just changed the resolution (called Metamodes? Can't quite remember) without verifying the other settings. I guess they went back to defaults, and got saved to my, ohh, what's that file called, /etc/X11-4 or something! I think perhaps I need to edit that file to put it correct, but I don't know a command line editor (like MSDOS's "edit.exe") that I can use.

Use any of:
vi
pico
emacs

I'm in the south of england today and it's roasting hot! I'm useless when I'm hot - no tolerance or patience: I had a look at "man vi" but rather than tackle it today I decided instead to stick my mandy9.0 CD in and chose "upgrade". That fixed it in about 20 minutes, rather than working for 2 hours. Lazy, I didn't learn anything, I feel guilty, but it worked so hey.

Thankyou for your help though

Damn, well I managed to get in the same pickle again, but this time I feel strong enough to tackle it properly

I've got vi going, and have managed to create, edit and save documents, so I'm ready to start fiddling with my /etc/X11/XF86Config file.

I've opened XF86Config in vi, and found the section about monitors. Does anyone have advice as to how I should edit it? Should I comment out (looks like I use "#") everything to do with TV-0?

After a little more study I've got some new ideas...

The way I got the error this time was as follows:
Everything was working fine using Mandrake9.0 but I decided to upgrade to Mandrake9.1. I put the CD in, rebooted, followed the instructions, and installed 9.1. For some reason, when it finished installing, I got the "no screens found" error.

Reading this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/55754

has given me a clue. When I get home tonight I intend to log in as root, rename XF86Config-4 to something else using the command

mv XF86Config-4 wasXF86Config-4

and reboot. Hopefully this will fix the issue. I can't wait till 17:00h to try this now!

Yanc normally makes a backup cpoy of your original settings at /etc/X11/XF86Config.yanc
Just open that file with nano or pico or the likes:

nano -w /etc/X11/XF86Config.yanc

and save it as XF86Config

Well, I tried:
removing XF86Config-4 completely (to use XF86Config)
removing both XF86Config and XF86Config-4 completely (who knows? Maybe it would be rebuilt!)
reverting to XF86Config-4.yanc (by renaming)
reverting to XF86Config-4.old (by renaming)
reverting to XF86Config-4.old.test (by renaming)

And none of them were a working configuration. I can't copy paste my XF86Config files here because I am on my XP machine (the Mandrake one isn't working, natch!)

I guess I need to start hacking away at editing XF86Config-4 then... where to start?

lol, well, here I am in lynx on my dead mandrake box. I'd heard of lynx but never seen it - just typed "lynx" as an experiment and here I am. I wonder if it's possible to somehow copy the contents of XF86Config-4 and paste it here using lynx?

Send me a mail.I'll send you my config file.

PROBLEM SOLVED!

As root, I renamed my XF86Config and XF86Config-4 to wasXF86Config and wasXF86Config-4. I then ran xf86config (note lowercase, this is an app not a textfile)

I found that text kept scrolling off the top of the screen, so switched to a fullscreen terminal window using ctrl-alt-f2, and running xf86config from there.
I followed the instructions, using the default values for most of the time, and saved a new XF86Config file. As it happens, when I tried opening kde using the:
startx
command, I got a mouse error. Turns out I'd incorrectly guessed the value for my mouse port setting, but the correct value was still inside wasXF86Config-4, so I corrected that.

And here I am, using Konqueror, in KDE, on Mandy9.1

Thankyou all for your helpful advise and support

Toby