"john midworth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Dear people at SLUG, > > I hope you can help me, or can recommend someone who could help me with a > bit of advice to get me started. > I have just got my own computer for Christmas/ birthday (an old one, but it > should be OK) and have installed Linux Red Hat 7.1. Everything was fine > until one day the Gnome menu gave me the options: log out, halt, or reboot. > I accidentally pressed halt on the footprint picture, and the computer > switched off. The next morning when I tried to reboot Linux, this is what > happened. First it says that the hard disk was not cleanly unmounted. Then > it goes through something like a scandisk process, then it gets to the > login prompt and then the screen goes blank/black and stays that way. So I > have to keep shutting it down wrongly all the time. This time I pressed "I" > to enter interactive startup and went through the whole thing and when it > got to login, it still flickered and went black. I'm sorry to have to > bother you, but my parents don't know anything about computers. I have to > get a proper Linux manual, but I'm only 9 (next week) so I haven't got it > yet. I've got Gnome for Dummies but it doesn't cover this. I would really, > really appreciate any help I could get to just get Linux to boot up. > Thank you very much, > L.M.
i'm not sure if this is appropriate to your sitution, but here we go. i installed redhat 7.2 on some office machines about two weeks back. a few days in, one of the machines couldn't run galeon anymore, and the tiles for the gnome panel disappeared. there were also fsks happening every couple of reboots. the problem appears to be that DMA was enabled on the drive by default (good on you, redhat), which was causing filesystem corruption. (some hardware configurations don't play with with DMA). i resolved the issue by forcing the installation of the packages which had been corrupted, and disabling DMA on boot via a program called "hdparm" - but a better solution would be to recompile the kernel with DMA not on by default. as for correcting the problems you're having with, reinstalling redhat is probably the easiest option. you can fix it manually, but when you're just starting out, it may be easier to just go through the install process again. i remember when i first got into linux around the age of 13, there were a few times i broke things to a level where i needed to reinstall - of course now i know i didn't have to :-) cheers! -- Damien Elmes [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
