Reboot gives blank screen or green lines

[jkalderash]

Hi, I'm definitely new. I spent most of the weekend trying to install Gentoo on my Dell Inspiron laptop. The first install I did went fairly well - I was able to reboot correctly, my hardware was recognized and so on. However, I realized I'd forgotten to do a couple of steps in the install, plus I wanted to try starting from stage 1, so I decided to try again. Now, having finally finished the second install, rebooting gives me a helpful Lilo screen, a bunch of positive-looking messages about how it's booting, and then, annoyingly, either a blank screen or a screen filled with vertical green lines and some incomprehensible blinking colorful patterns on the left of the screen.

Besides starting from stage 1 rather than stage 3, I didn't do much of anything differently. I have NVIDIA GeForce2, and I think I selected something on the kernel config which mentioned NVIDIA. I haven't installed the video drivers yet - I was planning on doing desktop configuration after finishing the install. I set the variables in make.conf before starting compiling this time - during the first install I just left them at default values, assuming that would be fine. (I set CHOST at "i686-pc-linux-gentoo" - I have Pentium 4 but a line in the file said to say pentium3 - and CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS at "-march=pentium3 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer").

I also set an additional line in my Lilo config file: "vga=ask". Oh, and I commented out the default font line in rc.conf. Sometime towards the end of the second install (either during or after the kernel compile) I kept on getting errors from "cloop" whenever I tried to enter anything at the cdimage prompt, saying there was an I/O error. I wanted to post here and ask before I rebooted, but it wouldn't even let me log in on anything except the screen I was doing the install on.

I'd really like to avoid a third install - I was very proud of getting through the bootstrapping and system install without killing myself or the computer - and it seems like this is just some sort of problem with the screen. Any help will be muchly appreciated!

-Laura

[slartibartfasz]

did u already try to disably ACPI (if this is an option for you)? there are all sorts of weird errors with the current kernels - including video failure at bootup.
_________________
To an engineer the glass is neither half full, nor half empty - it is just twice as big as it needs to be.

[jkalderash]

Yeah, I never turned on ACPI support. I just checked my kernel config and I'd selected a lot of stuff in the "Console" section becuase I'd had trouble with my text being way too big - could that have screwed up the screen? I might try to recompile the kernel after work without those options.