Red Hat 7.2 install nightmare on my laptop

[Blayze]

ok last night I installed Red hat 7.2 on my laptop. I am a newbie and forgot to install some stuff. Anyway I figure why not just reinstall with the cds tonight.

I have done this 3 times now. I setup the system the same way I did last night, but now when the setup finishes it ejects the CD and then says rebooting system
Restarting system.

then it locks up


if I press the power button and reboot it works but then locks up as soon as it loads X.


Anyone have any ideal why this is happening? I did the same thing last night and it worked great.

 

[Blayze]

its still doing the same thing...

I give up for tonight, guess I'll try some tommorow. I hope I dont have to put Windows 2k back on this machine. I was really hoping to use it for Linux

 

[mcveigh]

don't have X start on startup, just go to a copmmand line. from there you can debug X

 

[Anubis]

another red hat nightmare. i installed 7.32 last night on my PC got it up and runnin finr but i cant boot back into windows!!!! boot loader only lets me choose linux. see This Thred

 

[neuralfx]

is there now a forum only for subscribers? That link you provides links to a subscriber login page. You should be able to manually edit lilo.conf to allow you to boot back into windows ..
-neural

 

[Anubis]

ok i think i changed the link so it shouuld work

 

[Blayze]

ok I understand trying to debug X (although I have no ideal how to do this), but why would it lock up when it tryed to restart my system from the install?

 

[Blayze]

ok just did a reinstall again and pow same #*$&(@* thing.

It worked one time, and stupid me had to do a reinstall. I even let Red Hat use all its "defaults" on this one. It locks up at the end of the install when it should reboot, then the whole install hangs when I load X.


Im about to throw this laptop at the wall, seriously.

 

[manly]

Regardless of the OS, lock-ups can be difficult to diagnose (and relatively easier to fix).

Generally speaking, you have to isolate the problem to determine what the cause is. For Linux systems, one place to look is the log file /var/log/messages

X-Windows has its own log file in /var/log/XFree86.0.log

It's possible that these two log files will get you onto the right path to discovering what the root problem is.

Since Linux itself is a very stable operating system, lock-ups tend to be caused by poorly-written device drivers, some of which are 3rd-party.

For one thing, you didn't even tell us what your system is, so we have zero idea what the cause might be. Secondly, just because Linux is pretty mature today doesn't mean it installs or runs on every machine/configuration in existence. For example, laptops often are not as Linux-friendly as the average, boring desktop PC because they have more obscure hardware from vendors who won't publish enough information for reliable drivers to be written.

 

[Blayze]

thanks

I downloaded and installed Mandrake 8.2 with no problems today. (the laptop is Starscream in my rig sig)

Although I can't get power management to work right (when it resumes USB doesn't work and the system is slow as mud), at least it installed and allowed me to login to X.

 

[mcveigh]

so did you ever try to install w/o out X if everything works you could go back and install it

 

[rahvin]

Don't install to boot directly to X ever. You want runmode 3 with a startx to start the x windows system. This lets you debug whats wrong. I'm guessing you were getting the wrong video server for X.