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Now I have done it my Mandriva x86-64 is truly fubared.
After the splash screen (nice Mandriva logo with animated circle) everything goes black and nothing will bring my monitor on.
In fact Mandriva does not start so I cannot access the box via ssh either. And it is ocourse not possible to enter tty1 either becaues the monitor is gone

The monitor is ok though, and starts in Win.
So I start Mandriva in security mode init 1 and in that shell i cd to /home/me and remove the vboxaddition i installed last according to

(That was when the trouble started).
Then I tried to reinstall some virtualbox stuff but the network was gone so i had to start it manually like this:

Of course it is no good without the router so I had to do a:

and restart the network:
(start would probably have been enough -but that is what I did.)

That took care of the network so I could reinstall some virtualbox stuff.
Then I went to MCC and the graphics menu and all the settings were fine so I picked test - and the damn thing powered of my monitor immediately. GRR I pushed the "swedish" button for 3 sec and restarted the hard way.
And went at i again. This time i reentered the correct setting and got the offer to download the propietary Nvidia drivers - so I did. and restarted.
Now we are a bit further:
My system hangs on "starting wine" and there it stays. (So I have to push the swedish button again). At this point I can start tty1 with ctrl+alt+F1
Help please?

chkconfig wine off

When you are able to have a root prompt. You could even boot a 64-bit live disk, mount and chroot to your mandriva root, then run the chkconfig, more details at your request, feedback.

That might take care of the 'wine' roadblock but I suspect something deeper is afoot

BTW, do you know about 'magic keys'?

i.e. hold down right Alt and SysRq/Print Scrn buttons and push, in deliberate, somewhat slow (to allow the kernel time to execute each command) rseiub (raising skinny elephants is utterly boring) to reboot. With an o instead of b at the end, it should power down but I have had that not work for me.

Done the free 64 live disk bit - but booting in safe mode takes care of that too. Doing the chkconfig thing...
"cannot determin current runlevel". I dont think that is it either, it is a damned nvidia kernel thing I think. but running MCC and setting the nvidia card fails
Setting runlevel 3 in inittab and trying again....
Ok done that? No response at all that must mean that everything is perfect so I am rebooting again in runlevel 5 (X11)
Sorry chkconfig wine had no effect I think the Vbox kernel stuff fubared it. looking for an xorg.conf backup....
The irony is that I have a nice MCC GUI running in Archlinux with ssh -X

So I though i give startx a go on my Mandriva box - and it chrashes the whole box. Network, Display -everything. And my MCC in arc stoped working ofcourse.

I have recent memories of booting some new alpha or rc or beta live disk and seeing black monitor, "No signal", like X server is not even running.

IIANM, there is a workaround setting xorg.conf to use nouveau or nv. I think my symptoms of this phenomenon are due to nvidia driver. Perhaps uninstalling and reinstalling the nvidia[-kernel]-dkms stuff will do it, or installing the .run file from nVidia after removing the dkms stuff, instead.

Yes it has to be something like that. I just restored an old Xorg.conf file because I had no GUI at all. Now I have compiz workin but no grafics on the desktop just the four side by side when I whipe the upper left corner.

So how do I remove all the relevant stuff and how do I reinstall it - any tips and shortcuts are welcome.
...
Ok i had removed enough to get the GUI back with drakX11. Now the resolution is wrong but I am not "blind" anymore.
......
And the resolution is fixed too!
The clue is to find what to delete before letting drakX11 pull the nvidia driver - so it seems. The nouveau stuff did not work - nv did. Also it is safe to say that drakx11 does not work as intended anymore. It is not able to work unless you remove stuff manually.
Mandriva has been stable as a rock here for ages - but I have one tip. If you have a working virtualbox do not start with installing extra stuff for vboxadditions etc. It puls some kernel stuff that will fubar your X.
In other words I dont know what did this But I know what I was playing arround with - so don't do it
Now lemme see if I can get compiz to work again it dissappeard in the process - There was a 3 d option somewhere in MCC......

I would try something like that, once I've got another driver working, even if vesa. From there, running XFdrake ought to prompt to install the proprietary driver or you could try installing the file from nVidia. It is just a somewhat educated guess on my part which way to go.

Ok, I am recalling another problem with installing the nvidia driver leaving a bad link, maybe it's in cooker archives. Here's one hit, maybe you could verify library linkage is to proper version, although this case might not be what I was thinking of:



Also, if you experience X not starting, read /var/log/Xorg.0 and, maybe, the other log(s) there, for a report of the failure cause.

That works after a

My 3d is back too

The only thing that does not work anymore is the Virtualbox I started out with - it needs dkms and vboxdrive....
So 90 % solved - thanks! Always good to see a Guru in action - I sure am rusty. I must have been playing with Arch for too long.
Still I will not give up on that VB - perfection is always the goal....

Well, that's good you've made such improvement; I've had more than a bit of frustration with dkms- stuff. Haven't ever used nvidia-xconfig, so I think you pulled your own fat out of this fire, Über, not that I don't appreciate you propping up a guru, now and again.

Yeah but you see your input is high quality stuff and of high value the day ( I am bragging here; normally it is measured with a clock - not a calendar ) I have forgotten all about this - I can go back and get my bacon out of the fire again. I already use this forum as a place to write down good stuff that I will be needing - to the enormous pleasure of others too of course (especially when they already have documented it ). That is how it should work - I in my turn feed of the misfortune of others who have managed to fix it - and documented it here.
It can be the simplest thing.
Now I have my VB working too I had to reinstall the correct vboxkernel and it looks like one of the kernel-latest stuff pulled an old kernel to the box, leaving it pretty useless. I did not notice the first time but this time I could remove it before I rebooted (the 2.6.33.5 kernel for some reason ).
Don't ask me about the details I dunno. But I am going to do something I would never have thought I would do today - I am going to mark this one as SOLVED
So now I can continue testing chakra and give you the review...

Wow though viking, you sure have a LOT of unnecessary nvidia stuff installed. I always uninstalled the extranneous stuff that came on default install, *just* used dkms, kernel & kernel-devel with the nvidia drivers. Sometimes had to use upstream driver, but it always worked with just that (and xorg of course, but that's assumed anyway). Never used nvidia-kernel at all.

Yes I have upgraded and updated a lot of times without removing the old kernel - safety first! But I guess i could remove a few of them now.

Believe it or not, it does help in the operation of the drivers that you do need. I'm not talking regular kernel & kernel-devel. I'm talking nvidia-current-kernel, etc. - nvidia stuff that's unnecessary (and nvidia-current-kernel is unnecessary, just like regular kernel-source is).