On Wednesday 15 March 2006 01:51, Nick Smith wrote:
i have an HP dv8135nr and for some reason the 64bit dvd install isnt working. I have selected safe mode and it still just goes to a black screen and doesnt go any further. it does have an ATI xpresss 200M graphics card in it. could that be the problem? i really would like to make use of this 64bit cpu, and SUSE has gotten the farthest out of everything distro ive tried to install on this thing, but it still hasnt even gotten to the install part yet..... are there any other things i can tell the kernel at boot to maybe get past this. or how about a text based install? but if the GUI doesnt work in the install it probably wont work after the install, so thats no good either.
thanks for any help
Nick
G'Day Nick. I had a similar problem with my laptop. I took it to Sydney Linux Users' Group and a couple of young people sorted it for me. Apparently the following is quite common, but it may not be your problem. Many laptops use some RAM for video memory. The BIOS starts with the information that there is, say 512 MB RAM. Linux, quick off the mark, takes that information and starts setting up. Then the video hardware gets under way and takes some RAM, but Linux still thinks that the full 512 is available and thus there is a conflict with the use of RAM and the video seems to fail. Two solutions: 1: The young people put a time delay into my boot strap so that the video hardware had time to initialise before Linux became active. 2: M$ Windows is so slow at starting that the video hardware is up and running before Windows gets a chance to interrogate the size of RAM. Hence, as a colleague of mine does, start into M$ Windows, then, while the video hardware is wound up, he re-boots into Linux. Good luck, Colin