I know that the subject is strange… but the situation I lived yesterday was precisely that a strange situation where Helix didn't boot at all.
I had already lived situations where Helix wasn't able to configure the HW devices (mainly because of a lack of drivers for a specific hard drive), but this happened in the "configuring devices" step, that is, when the colourful screen appears after selecting the GUI or the command line mode.
However yesterday, after selecting the GUI or the command line, the process simply stopped. The CD stopped reading and a grey screen appeared. I tried with two different versions (1.7 and 1.9a) and the result was the same. Did anyone ever faced this error? If so, did you find out a solution? And if you didn't ever get this problem, what kind of trouble would you say it is?
Thanks!
This happens to me frequently on my Dell Precision Workstation set up as my analysis machine. It's got an Nvidia Quattro video card that doesn't handle the default video well.
That being said, have you ever used Helix on this computer? If this was a live preview/triage type situation and this is the first time you've used Helix on the PC, I'd feel comfortable in saying that it was due to video driver problems.
If this isn't the only time you've used Helix on this machine, what, if anything on the machine, has changed?
I'll look around for my notes to see how I get around the grey screen problem and post it here to see if that helps.
Chris
Ok….shouldn't post this early in the morning, or without caffeine in the system….my video card on the PC is a Quadro, not Quattro.
Anyway, I'd first determine what video card you've got in the system. As it autoconfigures devices, see what "server" (driver) it uses for the video. In my system, it uses the Xorg (nv) Server. This causes my system to grey screen every time.
To get around that, I add the following line to the boot options
xmodule=vesa
This forces the X server, which handles the pretty GUI interface, to use the vesa standard "server".
Give that a try to see if it works around your problem.
Chris
Wow! Your suggestion sounds very reasonable and surely the problem was that one, because after selecting any option everything went grey. Trouble is that it was a client's computer, but I think I will be able to try again this afternoon because I'm visiting him for other issues. Anyway, just giving a possible explanation has been great. Thanks!
However, what is still making me wonder, is why the CD Reader not even moved. Should it have gone on working even though I couldn't see anything in the screen?
I'd imagine there was no CD activity because the system had "booted", however, you couldn't see it because of the video problem. I booted my system w/o using the xmodule=vesa boot option and watched for several minutes. The gray screen happened and there was no cd drive activity.
Just theorizing at this point…I use linux from time to time, but I'm sure there are others on here that can give a better description of why it happens.
Good luck!
Chris
For the time being your solution is more than enough, thank you! This afternoon I'll give it a try with the xmodule=vesa option.