Hi,

I have installed mandrake 9.1 couple of months ago. It was working fine. I did not have a chance to play with it last two weeks. Now it does not let me login.

I type userId and password. It accepts them (otherwise it shakes the login window, clear the data and ask the password and userid one more time). After that, screen goes black like it is preparing to open the linux. But then it goes back to login screen again.

Do you have any ideas how to get rid of this problem?

ybc

I had exactly the same problem. I restarted computer and everything was alright. I don't know what caused the problem.

Are you in a text format instead of graphical?
If you are, after your userid and password, type startx..

I am in graphical format and I don't know how to change to text format. If you can tell me I can try that way.

By the way, I have restarted many times but it did not work.

text login for a US or US international k/board

hold down control and alt and press the F1 key, should give you another login screen.

However, the reason I am posting is , do you have another linux or windows installed? Can you see the mdk partitions from them?

My guess is you may have a video card setup problem. Depending on your post, if startx fails, but you can login as normal user, then type
su then your root password, then type mcc (for mdk control centre) and arrow down to graphical /video card selection and redo that

I did cntrl + alt + pressed F5 (F1 did not work) which took me on another screen and it was something like this;

localhost name :

That was the only thing in whole black screen. I typed user id and pressed enter. Then it asked for password. I typed password and entered. There it goes to the same screen asking localhost name.

I typed wrong userid and password. It complained that those were wrong. I just wanted to make sure password and userid which I am using were correct.

I did not change any hardware on my computer. That's why I wouldn't expect that my video card has anything to do with it. But it is just my guess.

I was seeing windows files from Linux while it was working. but I was never able to see linux files from windows. Since I am not able to login Linux I couldn't verify it this time.

May be I should try reinstalling Linux. Is there anyway that I can reinstall Linux but don't loose any data?

I have another question not related to this subject though. I was never able to start Linux in single mode. I couldn't find any window so I can type "linux single" or "linux 1". Do you know what I am missing?

By the way, thanks for your replies. Even though, we couldn't fix the problem, I have learnt couple of things at least

You can reinstall Mandrake Linux using the "upgrade" option and all your /home/ directory data should be safe. I've done it many times.

I even upgraded from 9.1 to 9.2 today and didn't lose any data. I had some other problems, but not that one!

I had the same thing happen as you are describing but it was a long time ago and I'm sorry to say I don't remember how I got it fixed. I may have reinstalled!

ok good troubleshooting so far. When I do the c/a F1 stuff I have 3 lines in mdk 9.1 talking about kernel and the last line is
localhost login NOT localhost name.

If you just want to play, the safest is to re-install, and create a boot disk.

2) I recommend you go to www.partimage.org and see if the online dox could save your bacon next time.

3) But why not grab 9.2 should be out as we speak?

I've had programs not work due to segementation faults since installing 9.2 yestererday. Spent all night trying to fix things. Got later version of one program from author's website and it ran OK after installing and restarting X Window server. My Kaspersky antivirus won't run--due to segementation fault. A lot of fonts don't look as good as under 9.1.

So I dunno. I might go back to 9.1. On the other hand, maybe I'd be even more messed up after that....

can you still login as root? username would be 'root' (w/o the quotation marks).

then you can change the password of a normal user by something like
passwd <username>