At 21:27:53 on Wednesday Wednesday 07 January 2009, Felix Miata <mrmazda@ij.net> wrote:
On 2009/01/07 19:40 (GMT+0200) Stan Goodman composed:
I posted the earlier phases of this adventure here about a month ago, and have since "progressed", but always with similar results in the end.
It quickly became clear that the DVD drive had failed in the middle of the installation, and I replaced it. Using the Installation DVD, I ran the installation-media verification routine, and found that it was defective (I have checked the iso file's MD5 code before I burned it), so I burned another and verified it successfully. I then installed v11.1 from this valid DVD.
Installation and configuration proceeded normally, but instead of rebooting to present me with a finished system, it stalled with a dark screen and unblinking cursor in the upper-left corner. A five minute wait convinced me that it was going nowhere.
On many systems that blinking cursor is the result of missing boot code in the MBR, or the lack of a startable/active primary partition that has a properly installed boot loader. Better systems instead of that nothingness will provide a message to the effect that nothing bootable is available.
Any idea how much happens before you reach the blinking cursor? Can you tell from disk activity that it does things for a while before halting? Possibly there's a problem related to your video chip. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=336302 might apply
(Two previous installations with the unverified DVD got further than this, in one case bringing up a finished system which I was able to use for the rest of the evening, but which failed to boot the following morning.)
In order to try diagnose the reason for all this, I installed Windows XP, using the entire 20GB HD. This installed faultlessly, and ran perfectly, even after two shutdowns and reboots. I interpret this as meaning that I do not have a hardware problem.
I have found time to try to investigate the problem further, starting from the assumption that it lies in the video driver. I first tried to install v11.0, in the hope that the slightly older release would support the driver; it doesn't, and the result is as before. I next tried to boot to the Fail-Safe system. This brings up a desktop (the first I have seen). It has an introductory screen that has a Close button. Unfortunately, the mouse cursor is not responsive, nor is the keyboard, so this is only a modest advance. But booting to the Rescue choice on the installation disk brought me to a level-3 boot, so now I know how to examine the system in text mode. What I want to do now is to find exactly what the video card is, so I can look into (hopefully) more modern driver releases that might even (dare I hope) enable me to boot a desktop. It is my understanding that information on the hardware and drivers is located in file xorg.conf. So I changed <cd /> and then did <find -name "xorg.conf">, which only brings me back to the Rescue prompt. (Substituting "xorg.*" does the same thing.) At this stage, I am asking for advice on how I can identify the video system. After I look into later driver releases, I may be back to ask other questions. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org