Chao06

I had this issue on an instillation of Arch and Ubuntu.

Here's the video I took of it when it did this in Ubuntu, but it's the exact same thing in Arch. When I run "startx" my monitor freaks out:
YouTube - What my computer's doing

It was on the same harddrive (Toshiba MK6034GAX), on the same computer (Dell Inspiron 6000).
I also have an install of Ubuntu on a different harddrive that on the same computer boots Gnome in Ubuntu (same version, 9.04) no problem, so the only variable that could be causing the problem is the harddrive.

Here's the harddrive specs for the Toshiba HDD
http://sdd.toshiba.com/techdocs/MK60...otes-RevA0.pdf
And here's for my other HDD (Seagate ST960822A) just for reference
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...us_5400_pm.pdf

Both installs on the offending disk were installed after fresh reformats.

Does anyone have any idea, hypothesis, experience, anything that might help?
Thanks,
David

coopstah13

Perhaps the disk is no good? You should try booting up a live cd or inserting the disk into another linux machine and run fsck command on the partitions.

Rubberman

Really, X and the hard drive are totally unrelated. Are you sure you have the same video driver installed on the drive that works, vs. the one that doesn't? As coopstah13 said, it could be a bad disc as well. In any case, what video driver did you specify when you installed Ubuntu and/or Arch on the drive that didn't work?

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Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real time.

Chao06

Well, in Ubuntu specifying a video driver isn't really necessary... It's always just worked out of the box, especially on this computer. In Arch I hadn't configured anything in X yet, I just installed xorg, gdm and XFCE4 and ran startx. Then it did the same thing as Ubuntu did, and figured it couldn't be coincidence. I'll run an fsck, but I'm almost positive there's not bad sectors or anything.

Last night I ran
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
on the harddrive, just to be thorough. I'm going to try installing again once I get back from work, and I'll run fsck as well before I start.

I'll keep you posted.

Thanks,
David

Chao06

so I ran the dd over night, and today I reinstalled Arch over it. It did the same thing, so I tinkered w/ some settings, and eventually by changing the video driver to the intel generic, I was able to get X (no XFCE, no gdm) but the mouse and keyboard didn't work. That's as far as I got with it.

I gave up on that and decided to put Ubuntu back on the computer, that way I could tinker with something I was more familiar with, and it lo-and-behold works! And I don't have a clue why x_x

This whole thing has given me a massive headache...

Rubberman

Well, you can try to copy the /etc/X11/xorg.conf from your working drive to the non-working one and see if that works.

__________________
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real time.