Okay, I've gone and done it. At 3am, bored and curious, I changed the screen resolution to try and get a crisper look at things. Now when I boot the screen goes "out of range"

The back-story is I've never quite liked the rewsolution I've had from which to choose. I have Mandrake 10.0 Official. Dual-booting w/ WinXP. When I installed Mandrake my monitor was not listed so I had to choose what appeared to be the closest one (f-series)

I have a HP Pavilion f50 monitor. I can't exactly remember which one I chose but it was also f-series. For graphics I have S3 Graphics ProSavage DDR.

I have searched silar problems but no solution helped me. I'm booting with GRUB. So far I have tried:
At boot-esc. nothing
At boot-c(for command line) xf86config command unrecognized
At boot-c xorgconfig command not recognized

I'm unable to see anything after watching the boot proccess in verbose mode(everthingseems normal there) but when I should start seeing GNOME I get the "out of range" message. So I need to be able to fix this blind so to speak.

I have a live Knoppix CD, I know people have used this to recover files but could it also be used to change my settings? Hmm, I'll try that in the meentime.

TIA,
carpetguy.

UPDATE:

I've tried my Knoppix disk and think there may be a way to do it if I could find where the setting are located. I'm able to navigate through all my partitions and directories. Does anyone know where the settings are stored?

carpetguy

Press
CTRL + ALT + (- on numpad)

when you think you are in gnome and that probably get a viewable display again


or the best way

choose failsafe from the lilo boot menu
and type this at the command line
root@localhost# vi /etc/X11/XF86config-4

or if VTY 1 works use that as root and type
root@localhost# init 3
to edit the file
root@localhost# vi /etc/X11/XF86config-4


and change 1024x800 to something more reasonable
800 x 600 is the safest
look or this


press i to insert text in vi
press ESC then type ZZ (two capital Z and enter to sagve the file)

:P

I did this and yes I got a veiwable(albiet large) screen. I was however so large that I mistook what i saw as a blank desktop so I rebooted to try again and could not repeat it.



Ok this is where my newbiness showed through. It took a while for me to understand what to do here. This was my first exposure to VIm so after some looking and trying, I decided I wasn't ready yet to use this method. I guess I was impatient to fix my problem( I loath booting to Windows another minute) so I just inserted install disk one and only entered the screen res I needed and skipped all else. After completion I had no network connection so I created a new one and all is well.

I now have 2 instances of /etc/x11/XF86config (one mark old). Is this normal or did I infact complete writing the file? Hmmm, another thing to discover. I really love this, warts and all. lol.

I don't prefer the way I did it. I want to be able to fix issues(and I do have a couple more issues) without having to re-install. That is a Windows trick I'd rather not employ. I have a machine on the side I will be using for testing, on that I will try and duplicate this problem so I can use your last suggestions. I need to do much more reading into shells and such.

Thank you very much for your help, I wish I could say it alone solved my problem but alas, I'm a hard learner. I plan to learn Linux inside and out as I do not plan to go back to my Win partition. I'm transferring all data from there to here using Mandrake and changing permmisions as I go.

Now to work on my other troubles, mostly sound related and startup services and, hopefully, not need to ask advice.

Thanks again and thank you to the whole community for being here.

carpetguy.

yea X is annoying because each distro uses a different file to store the screen settings

in mandrake there in XF86config-4 XF86config Xorg.conf.

/etc/ has everything you will want to learn
fstab (location of you partitions

likr on mine i added a mount of an ISO at boot and use that as my install files source

/etc/bashrc (stored task run during boot from what i have gathers Autoexec.bat of linux )