Still having boot trouble

[David O'Hare]

I have installed Red Hat Linux 9 on a Packard Bell Easy Note laptop. When i have finished installing it says congratulatons etc and tells me to reboot the system to begin. I do this and everything starts up ok, i then get a black screen with white writing while it performs various checks. The writing then starts scrolling very fast which i have read is supposed to happen. Unfortunately this doesn't stop, eventually it will just restart and do it again. I have noticed that while it is doing the checks it puts "ok" in green letters after various stages. One of the stages, though, has the word "Failed" in red letters. I have now sorted this out, however, the scrolling still continues. I put in my installation disk and went to linux rescue and from there went to a command shell. I typed in "startx" and the following came up:

Hostname lookup failure

Fatal server error
Cannot open log file "/var/log/XFree86.0.log"

giving up
xinit: No such file or directory (errno2): unable to connect to x server
xinit: No such process (errno3): Server error.

PLEASE HELP ME

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

first of all I suggest you to specify runlevel 3 as default runlevel to prevent continiuous reboots.
to do that login with your dikette to rescue mode and edit the file /etc/inittab
locate the line:
id:5:initdefault:

and change 5 to 3
save your changes. and reboot.
Also see the file /etc/hosts-there should be a line matching your ip to hostname.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

The "hostname lookup failure" indicates that you have not yet setup the network on your Laptop correctly.

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hello,

First, you need to know that using rescue mode, only few operating boot steps are completed. Therefore, neither hostname, nor network configuration are properly set. Rescue mode should be used in text only.

If I were you, I would try to boot single user instead. At Grub prompt, edit the boot command-line (type "e"), then at the end of kernel loading command type " s". Then type ESC and "b" to boot. When in single user, try to read /var/log/messages to find out what is happening.

Good luck.

Kodjo