Trouble booting Linux using S-video

[Reel]

When I boot with S-Video plugged in, the BIOS shows up fine and the tv displays that the grub bootloader stage 2 is beginning and then it never continues. If I plug in a VGA monitor or nothing, it boots fine and when it gets to the X login screen, I can hook in my S-Video cable and see everything just fine and it works fine on the tv after this point.

I don't intend on rebooting this machine often but it would be nice to figure out what is causing this problem and perhaps fix it especially since my other linux machine boots fine with just the S-Video cable (on the same TV and S-Video cable right now).

The specs are: K7S5A Pro with SDRAM, Athlon 800, Nvidia GF4 MX420 (pull from a Dell, possibly XFX brand), SB Live Value, Fedora Core 3 (upgraded from RH9.2).

My friend suggested that perhaps there is some setting somewhere causing grub to use hi-res graphics in booting but we couldn't find it. It just seems odd to me that it works fine in X and the BIOS display but totally freezes the system if it is plugged in during the initialization and bootloader.

Thanks.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Does the system freeze or does it just not display to the tv?

Did you compare the configs from the machine that works and the ones that doesn't?

 

[Reel]

It freezes though it responds to a control-alt-del. I ran a continuous ping on it and I never get a response if it is booting with the s-video plugged in. (I do get one otherwise).

The only graphics config that I know of is the /etc/X11/xorg.conf which I copied over but I assume it doesn't affect the booting part prior to X starting. I have no idea where else to look to find out why it is not booting past grub when I have the s-video cable plugged in.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

This may be a grub issue. See if you can change grub's settings or use lilo.

EDIT >> Check this out