Install MDK9.0 on Asus a7n266-vm succeds but won't boot

[fierywizard]

Hello,

I've just finished installing 9.0 on a:
Asus A7N266-VM motherboard (integrated graphics, audio and lan)
Athlon 1800+
512MB RAM
40GB Seagate
3COM NIC

The install seemed to go off without a hitch, and all the integrated bits and pieces were identified.

The hd is partitioned into
8MB /boot,
130MB /,
10GB FAT32 for windows,
9GB LVM and a
20GB FAT32.

The boot loader is lilo.

When I boot the machine, lilo comes up, from which I can boot into windows with no trouble, but if I try to boot into any of the linux images the screen goes black and it just hangs.

Some advice on how I can remedy this would be much appreciated.

A few links I found seem to refer to similar symptoms, though it was grub which caused the failure and lilo worked fine. Others experience similar things after booting, when they start X, problems with audio, etc.
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=767

Has anybody else experienced this?
Might updating the drivers supplied by nvidia fix this?
How would I go about updating the drivers from a rescue disk?

Any help MUCH appreciated.

Thanks
Dan

[bwkaz]

Try, on the LILO menu, highlighting your Linux entry (so that below the menu, it fills the prompt in with whatever you called the entry), then typing a space and a 3. This will make Linux boot to runlevel 3, which is command-line only. At that point, you can edit /etc/inittab, and change the :id:5:initdefault line to :id:3:initdefault. Runlevels are documented pretty well in that file, also.

Now you'll come up in text mode on every boot, so you can try other options to fix X. (Actually, I should probably tell you that I'm fairly sure that X is what's giving you problems. I'm not positive, but I'll go on that assumption anyway, because it's easy enough to check: ) Just do a startx to try to load up X, and if it doesn't lock, then boot that way. Although I'm pretty sure it still will lock up.

You do have the nForce drivers installed, correct? Is the "integrated graphics" chip on that motherboard an nVidia chip? If so, you might need to install the nVidia graphics drivers as well -- even Mandrake 9 does not come with either of those (the nForce or graphics drivers). No distro that I know of does.

Edit: or maybe your problem is the same as this guy's -- that seems more likely to me:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2572

[fierywizard]

OK. Simple really. The apm was causing the boot to fail.

Once apm was disabled in bios everything was fine.

Apparently the bios' on this family of boards is still a bit rough.

Just FYI I didn't have the nforec driverss installed (other than any wihch come with mdk 9) and it wasn't an X problem as the kernel was dying way before X was getting a chance.

Thanks for the response though, bwkaz.

Dan