X repeatedly attempts to load and fails - help request

[John McFee]

Hi,

I have searched the news and forums for  days and I cannot find any 
reference to my problem.

I just yum upgraded my 5 year old Dell 400 MHz computer (ATI Mach 64
graphics card, Dell 1226H 19" CRT) from Fedora Core 1 to FC2. (I have
yum upgraded other computers in the last while from FC1 to FC2 with no
trouble.) The upgrade went fine and everything worked OK for the next 2
days (computer was shut down and started up several times, operated 
under Gnome desktop, with no problems).

Yesterday, on booting up, all was normal until it got to the part where
it should generate the login gui screen. The screen went blue (with the
hour glass turning), then switched back to the login text screen, then
back to the blue screen, etc. This continued for six tries and then a
screen appeared that said:
"The display server has been shutdown about 6 times in the last 90 sec,
it is likely that something bad is going on. I wait 2 minutes before
trying again on display :0."

This whole process (flashing attempts at X windows, then error message)
kept repeating roughly every 2 minutes.

In between error messages, I logged in as root in the text mode and
loooked at the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. It had been generated by
system-display-config and looked fine. I then looked at the output of
/var/log/xorg.0.log. It looked normal, no errors or warnings until the
very last lines:

Right after loading module pcidata (which  went OK), it said:

Fatal Sever Error
xf 860 Open Console: cannot open virtual console 7.

I logged out and shutdown, then rebooted under the old FC1 kernel
(2.4.22.2194.npt1)  and everything was just fine! Rebooting under my new
FC2 kernel (2.6.8-1.521) gives the same problem as before.

I am stumped. This occurred well after the upgrade, as though a file got
clobbered, but I have no idea what. Hardware must be fine, since it
works under the old kernel. And for 2 days, it worked under the new
kernel. Any help is really appreciated.

John McFee

-- 

John E. McFee
jemcfee at shaw.ca