I've been running a dual boot WinXP and Mandrake for the last month or so without any big problems. Recently, I decided I wanted to change the lilo intro screen so that it wouldn't timeout to the default setting in 5 seconds as it had been doing. I tried using Mandrake's lilo gui tool to do this, but it forced me to change other aspects of the lilo.conf file that I didn't want to change. The changes appeared ok. I rebooted and started up windows which worked fine. When I tried to go back to Mandrake, I found that it was starting in command line mode rather than X mode and that it couldn't initialize my nvidia driver and therefore couldn't start X. Even worse, when I returned to windows, I found that it was having all kinds of memory issues, slowness, running random processes that it shouldn't run. XP has always worked very well for me, so these problems came as a surprise. Could the Mandrake problems be affecting XP?

Here are some relevant file excerpts that may shed light on this problem. Please excuse the ugly formatting as they are copied out of windows note pad.

lilo.conf:

boot="/dev/hda"
lba32
prompt
timeout="1000"
message=/boot/message
root=/dev/hda5
default=Windows

image="/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.21-0.13mdk"
label="linux"
root="/dev/hda5"
read-only

image=/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage
label="Linux_Compiled"
root=/dev/hda5
read-only
optional

other=/dev/hda1
label="Windows"

image="/dev/hda1"
root="/dev/hda5"

This seems to be missing some key information, but I'm not sure what needs to be changed.

From XFree86.0:

...

(II) LoadModule: "glx"
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so
(II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.4496
Module class: XFree86 Server Extension
ABI class: XFree86 Server Extension, version 0.1
(II) Loading extension GLX
(II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.o
(II) Module nvidia: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.4496
Module class: XFree86 Video Driver
(II) LoadModule: "mouse"
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/mouse_drv.o
(II) Module mouse: vendor="The XFree86 Project"
compiled for 4.3.0, module version = 1.0.0
Module class: XFree86 XInput Driver
ABI class: XFree86 XInput driver, version 0.4
(II) v4l driver for Video4Linux
(II) NVIDIA XFree86 Driver 1.0-4496 Wed Jul 16 19:06:03 PDT 2003
(II) NVIDIA Unified Driver for all NVIDIA GPUs
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 01:05:0
(--) Assigning device section with no busID to primary device
(--) Chipset NVIDIA GPU found
(II) resource ranges after xf86ClaimFixedResources() call:
[

...

Setting vga for screen 0.
(II) Loading sub module "vgahw"
(II) LoadModule: "vgahw"
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/libvgahw.a
(II) Module vgahw: vendor="The XFree86 Project"
compiled for 4.3.0, module version = 0.1.0
ABI class: XFree86 Video Driver, version 0.6
(**) NVIDIA(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
(==) NVIDIA(0): RGB weight 888
(==) NVIDIA(0): Default visual is TrueColor
(==) NVIDIA(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
(--) NVIDIA(0): Linear framebuffer at 0xD8000000
(--) NVIDIA(0): MMIO registers at 0xE0000000
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module!
(EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting ***
(II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
(II) UnloadModule: "vgahw"
(II) Unloading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/libvgahw.a
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found

check the inittab file in the /etc directory
there should be a line that reads as follows:

id:X:initdefault:

the X above should be 5 if you want to boot directly into X11.

I haven't heard anything about the other issue.

Thanks, I've sorted out my problems with X. It seems that my NVIDIA driver needed to be re-installed.

I'm still having weird processes eat up CPU in XP, but this is probably not the place to work on that.