AlRoss Posted October 7, 2008 Report Share Posted October 7, 2008 (edited) Well, thanks to all you kind guys who helped me through the dual-boot install and recovering those lost Windoze partitions. Dual boot works a treat now. I got so excited that I figured it might be fine to try some of those fancy 3D-windowing choices - Compiz Fusion I think. Oh what a fool am I! Here I am on Windoze accessing this forum for help yet again. All I can see now is a blank white screen with nothing on it at all apart from the mouse pointer. To be sure the pointer changes as the mouse moves around the screen but other than that nothing but a blank white screen. I gotta be honest and say I'm not impressed. This is the second deep hole I've fallen into and right now I'm feeling like I'm back 25 years playing dungeons and dragons on a PDP-11 (yes I am that old!). That dungeon had a totally dark cave where everything was pure guesswork and you "died" regularly. I gave it up after that. I've tried using the distro DVD to re-install. It wants to erase the partitions. I'm getting wily and ain't having any of that!! I've also tried asking it to "upgrade" to Mandriva spring 2008. It heads off down that road OK but it soon gets lost and the script gets stuck in a loop. I've also tried choosing the "safe" mode - its plain boring white too - so less safe than one might imagine. BUT, I notice that the boot process has a verbose mode which also offers an "interactive" boot up. I'm wondering if anyone knows how I can use that to undo my folly. Failing that I also have a fall back plan. If all else fails I'm gonna use Windoze to scrub those Linux partitions and start all over again. You can imagine my enthusiasm for that :unsure: Still at least I know what to do to recover my Windoze partitions next time round :D But seriously can anyone point this foolish man at a way back out of this [white] hole. Bear in mind that I can see NOTHING on the desktop. It's a total whiteout apart from the mouse pointer. Thanks in anticipation. Al [moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman] Edited October 10, 2008 by AlRoss Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted October 7, 2008 Report Share Posted October 7, 2008 (edited) When you have your white screen, try typing Ctrl + Alt + F1 Login as root and type XFdrake Have a look at this thread: http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=92260 My guess is your video card is not sufficiently powerful to run Compiz Fusion. It IS pretty though B) Edited October 7, 2008 by daniewicz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medo3891 Posted October 7, 2008 Report Share Posted October 7, 2008 First, what display card do you have? If you can get to the log in screen choose drak3d from the session type menu and disable compiz from there. Alternatively you can expand Advanced under compiz and choose native support instead of Xgl or vice versa and see if that works. If you can't get to the graphical log in screen then press Alt+Ctrl+F1, log in as root then run drak3d and disable 3D desktop. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlRoss Posted October 7, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 7, 2008 Thanks guys. That Ctrl + Alt + F1 caper is one to remember! The other forum link was a big help too. Using XFdrake I got back to a stable position so here I am back on Mandriva :) And it really has to be the way to go. Logging back into Windoze was very frustrating - the startup is unbelievably slow, we're talking 10 to 20 minutes - whereas Mandriva is up in around 30 seconds. But I guess I need to be a little less adventurous with environment settings for a while. Looks like my video card isn't up to the likes of Compiz Fusion. Tell you what though. At one point late last night, still blundering about in the whiteout, moving the mouse off to left or right of the screen produced a nice rotating cube effect - just a snow white cube is all. Thanks again for the great advice. Think I'll try walking for a while now. Running too soon gets me bruises :D Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted October 7, 2008 Report Share Posted October 7, 2008 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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