quote: Original post by Russell
Is ext3 a journalled file system? I think that''s what I selected during install (it was the default).

Yes.

quote: Original post by Russell
I must have done something wrong at some point, because this has happened several times now, with different distros. I boot up and multiple things that had worked fine ever since I installed linux just stop working. Maybe I need to read the directions more carefully or something. I dunno.

Don''t take this the wrong way (I don''t really know you): but it''s very likely a problem with the user (something you did as root?) or the hardware, especially if it has happened more than once. Which? I couldn''t say without more information. If you can post a full boot log somewhere, someone may take the time to look through it and try to see what''s wrong.

about the screen size, the nvidia driver tries to detect the maximum refresh rates your monitor supports, and normally gets it wrong, well has in my case, to get a decent resolution you have to specify the IgnoreEDID option to the nvidia driver and specify the refresh rates manually.

*****WARNING*****
specifying incorrect refresh rates can trash your monitor, i am not responsible if you do what i say, check your monitor manual for the refresh rates it supports

in your XF86Config-4 file in the nvidia driver section add the following line: Option "IgnoreEDID" "true"

and in the monitor section specify the CORRECT(it will say in your monitor manual) HorizSync and VertRefresh rates, eg mine is:

HorizSync 30-96
VertRefresh 50-160

then you can add whichever modes you want in the screen section, HTH

What distribution did you used Russell? try SUSE or Mandarke distribution may be it will help you to solve your problem.

quote: Original post by Russell
Thanks for the virtual console tip. I didn''t know about that.

I checked the errors again, and there''s one regarding something about USB, one about eth0, and one about iptables. And can''t get into a GUI of course, even after I use the backup XF86Config that used to work (and the other one didn''t appear to be changed). Who knows.

A good way of fixing your linux is to use a Knoppix distro. It once happened to me that i messed something in my linux and i couldn''t boot linux, so i booted Knoppix (you don''t have to install, you run from the CD), chrooted to my Linux partition, and fixed what i had messed.

Victor.

You can do this with many distros. I actually keep around my old Slackware 8.1 disc for this very purpose (I use Gentoo now, and occasionally I mess things up and need to boot into the system and change stuff... Like my /etc/fstab file I fscked up the other day )

I managed to get my system screwed up in a similar way recently. It was after I had played with the kernel source in areas I shouldn''t have. It worked fine after a compile but when I upgraded the sources thorugh the SuSE updater, recompiled and booted some quite wierd things started to happen. Half of the things during boot showed failed and when it finally booted into console mode the cursor was blinking about three times the normal speed and some of the files were inaccessible although they showed up in ls. Before the reboot I had also downloaded the entire SuSE 8.2 ftp tree (6 gigs but not running out of space) and kept the machine up for about 18 hours running a http server, downloading stuff and doing other fairly crazy things. A week before I had moved my entire linux filesystem (reiserfs) to a larger (ex-windows) partition, also resizing it and updating fstab and lilo. This is probably not the cause of the problem because everything worked fine until this event (yet another example of the power of Linux). All this just before my vacation. I''m going to have a fairly nice time when I get home . I even had to Ctrl+C out of reiserfsck because I was in a hurry. If the system can recover from THIS I will be truly amazed... So now I''ve learned a lesson: always make backups before tweaking!

P.S. Knoppix is The Ultimate recovery tool!

Is your windows partition NTFS or FAT32? If it''s NTFS people have had troubles with windows overwriting important Linux data, that could be the problems with your hardware (eth0, USB, etc..). I say, get a Linux that is good with NTFS (I think Redhat can coexist well), and make it set up so that NTFS cannot write to Linux (write protection etc..). You could try putting write protection on critical files, that would be a good idea as well.

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