Yet again, problem concerning the black screen of death.

I bought my copy of Knoppix earlier today as I'm up to my mustache with using Winblows 98, and I've also been interested in Linux for a while now. Thus I shall righteously be labled "/\/00b". :lol:

So far, I've been unsuccessful getting the program to run or install. I made a (floppy) boot disc with "boot.img", rebooted with the CD in my drive. And I see the penguin at the top left corner of the screen. Some things start to load, and I see a big list of grey errors going down the screen (I'm not sure what it is even though I've seen it several times. Something about data loss from reading the CD). Then it it starts detecting things like my USB devices (mouse and keyboard), and it gets to my video card (an ATI Radeon 7500). It loads and configures it alright from what I could see, but then it says something about loading into the GUI and from that point on I'm staring at a black screen regardless of what I press or how long I hold it down.

If I could take one single guess, I'd say that it's the video card. Or maybe those errors at the beginning had something to do with it. But my CD-drive plays everything else just fine. Any help or suggestions at all are greatly appreciated. I was very excited and looking forward to finally being able to use this OS, but this is turning out to be a complicated and frustrating issue.


(One last thing, I tried mixing commands like knoppix 800x600, bf1024x768 and got the same result. As I am typing this post, Windows has just enlightened me that it decided my "Rundll32" commited an invalid page fault. HELP ME!)

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Originally Posted by Veclord

I see a big list of grey errors going down the screen (I'm not sure what it is even though I've seen it several times. Something about data loss from reading the CD).

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From your description it sounds like a bad cd. Are the errors "cloop" errors? If so you've definitely got a bad cd. Try booting like so:

knoppix testcd

It should return "Everything looks ok" or similar.

I agree with mzilikazi. Your CD is probably a dud. I would try burning it again (possibly on different media) and/or burning it at a slower speed.

You can get a clearer idea of what's going on by doing as mzilikazi said and using the testcd cheat code.

Well, I got it working right and countered the crap CD problem by doing a HD install.

Now I'm having problems with my modem. It's a Creative Modem Blaster PCI DI5633. I can't find a driver that'll work on linux yet and whoever I ask just says "go buy a real modem" :roll: .

This site should be of help, http://www.linmodems.org. Also, why can't you burn another CD - the modem might not be working because the drivers for it are on a corrupted part of the disk!

The allways cheap tip 'burn new cd' is mostly wrong.
Why should the screen turn black when starting the gui?

Try starting with "4" which means runlevel 4.
So if your options are "THIS AND THAT"
knoppix26 THIS AND THAT 4

This should give you a shelllogin.
Then you may start x11 with 'startx' and evaluate the logfile after crashing:

cat /var/log/XFree86.0.log