X Windows no longer comes up

[Hiko]

Aloha all,
I had my sytem running fine and everything was going great. I have an nVidia Geforce4 MX 4000. I went to the tutorial on this forum on how to upodate my drive from "nv" to "nvidia" but it was for fc3. Not sure that makes a difference. Performed the tasks there which were installing nvidia glx and the nvidia module and it modified the xorg.conf. There was a backup of my xorg.conf I had made to be safe. So, I did this and after it completed via yum, I rebooted. Now X doesn't come up the computer hangs. So I threw in my Fedora DVD and did linux rescue and went to /mnt/sysimage/etc/X11 and copied my old xorg.conf back over. Rebooted and it gets all the way to almost the login screen and goes blank. So went back to linux recover and the xorg.conf with the "nvidia" is back in place...?! I verified all the files before this using vi and made sure that the one I was cp'ing back to xorg.conf had the "nv" in it. How did it copy back the "nvidia" one and does anyone know how I can fix this to get X back up? Also, I did a full install when I started out. So I know I am not missing any packages. I suspect I can not do the nVidia driver because it is on a second party card. Not sure though. Any advice is appreciated.
Mahalo,
Edward

[Nerderello]

not sure what is going wrong, but try and see if you can get a hold of a text console (press Ctrl Alt F1 or F2 or F3. and F7 to get back to the GUI). If you can, then use vim or vi or nano to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and make the one change to put nv back. It will appear in the section marked Section "Device" and be on the line that contains Driver . Save the file, jump back to the gui (Ctrl Alt F7) nd kill X (Ctrl Alt Backspace). This will cause linux to start X afresh, reading the new xorg.conf as it does.

good luck

Nerderello

[genesus]

I had better luck using the drivers directly from nvidia rather than through yum...I had a black screen for awhile as well, I had forgotten to comment out two lines that the tutorial mentions in the modules section.

[Hiko]

Aloha.
Ok, I went in through the linux rescue mode on the DVD and booted up. After that I modified the inittab using vi to boot to runlevel 3. Removed the DVD and rebooted. Entered runlevel 3 and logged in as root. Then went to /mnt/sysimage/etc/X11 and modified the xorg.conf using vi to read "nv" vice "nvidia". Typed "startx" and everything worked good. logged out and then "exit"d out of command prompt. Logged in as normal user and did a startx again. World is cool. It works and everything seems fine. Thinking I was good at this point went back to the command prompt out of X and then did less on both the inittab and xorg.conf. Still runlevel 3 and still "nv". Modified the inittab to put it back to runlevel 5 using vi. Saved and rebooted. Computers hangs with a blank screen. Ctrl-Alt-F# does not work nor does Ctrl-Alt-backspace. hardbooted and then booted off of DVD again. Mod'd inittab to go back to runlevel 3. Rebooted. Exited and rebooted. Logged in as root and went to xorg.conf. It now says "nvidia"...?! Changed that back to "nv". Exited as root and logged back in as normal user..startx....went to linuxforums.org and made this post. nvidia driver is in there because I did the yum install nvidia-glx kernel-module-nvidia-`(uname -r)` as recommended in the tutorial on same site. Not assigning blame here. Just being thorough. Anyone have any ideas? Also, can I do a yum remove? Will that get whatever is changing my xorg.conf out? Any place I can go to figure out what the yum install did exactly and try to undo it? And last, how can I figure out why this nvidia update is not working on my system? Any advice is appreciated.
Mahalo.
Edward

[Hiko]

Aloha.
After a lot of research and pulling of hair out due to xorg.conf and such I finally tried yum remove nvidia....and it removed the whole thing. Now I am back to the old "nv" driver which works. So that gets me back up and trunning in X again but does not explain why the nvidia driver don't work. I joined the nv forum and will try to get some advice there. So doing a yum remove solved all the issues except why the nvidia driver don't work. Thanks all for the advice.
Mahalo.
Edward