i have been trying to use slax and gparted live cs to fix some a few partitions on my computer and when i try to load x my screen goes black. and when i look closely at the screen i can see an error message could not start x. i am still able to use command line in slax but i cant do anything with the gparted live cd. i realy need the gparted live cd to work because i am trying to fix an ntfs partition that has most of my data. and is there any way to get ntfs support in slax without using x
that is not the problem. i have been using this and other cds for a while and they just dont seem to work on my new compter. they work on all the others in the house, i think it might be driver problems with my graphics card.
Live disros are always a compromise between drivers and size.
Most either work out of the box or they don't.. and if not there isn't much you can do about it. As you have neglected to tell us what your graphics card is we will be guessing.. and I guess nvidia.. if it's ati then be prepared for headaches.
I went for a look at slax specifically for this problem, and came up with the "try using the vesa driver instead of xorg"
Quote:SLAX requires you to enter the root user?s name (root) and password (toor), then asks you to type startx or xconf. Running xconf will attempt to auto-configure the X window system and choose the best settings for your video card. Once xconf has finished, you type startx to run the X window system and KDE, launching into a GUI.
Wonder why you seem to think you need a live cd distro or a dodgy gparted disk.. any modern linux installer will have tools like cfdisk at runlevel 2, or you can let an install disk run a bit and use the GUI partitioner.
Another thought.. I have had bad times booting linux disks in dvd drives.. why I have no idea, but they don't like it.
thanks deadlove. and my video card is listed in my sig with my specs. and i wanted to use the gparted live cd to transfer files from a windows partition that got screwed up then format and transfer the files back. but anyways thanks for the info and i will try that after i reinstall windows. it just crashed and is pissing me off. if only i could play all my games in linux.
Hi.. Now I know what you want to do and it's really easy
Grab a download of a slightly old Puppy linux live disk 2.13 works really well. Hang a spare hdd or a usb drive (or in theory you could even burn on cd.. but puppy doesn't have burning software) in there and after getting to the desktop.. bit of messing around with xorg/xvesa you will find in the system/tools menu a full gui mount/unmount/gparted toolset. I use it to recover files from trashed windows boxes by formatting a hdd fat32 and just transferring everything over. There are other ways.. like making new partitions on the same drive, but I always have trouble writing even ntfs sourced files to ntfs partitions with linux. Dunno.. probably just me. With hardware specs (didn't realise your linux box was the one in your sig.. and I don't read lists of numbers anyway.. gobbledegook to a *nix user like me.. twin alpha with 512 ram and onboard matrox 12mb graphics :)like yours sabayon must be worth a look.. and it natively supports ntfs too.. added bonus. woot!
thanks. i will grab a copy of puppy. it would have been nice if i had know this yesterday before i reinstalled windows but this can be usefull in the future.
I have a really good time with sabayon 64 edition today on a blazing fast amd dual core system. Everything worked from the live disk,no issues whatsoever.. not even with the twin nvidia graphics setup.. detected and instelled drivers right off.. and when it was installed.. well.. the only words are bloody amazing. I burned a proper copy of the live disk saved on an xp ntfs partition right off with k3b.. this must be worthy of consideration, even at a 4 gig download.
that sounds good, i will definatly consider that for my next distro. so does it come with beryl and stuff like that preinstalled? and how much space does it use after installed?
Didn't get chance to play with beryl on it.. The hardware was hanging with the graphics acceleration (later resolved by replacing some ram, they were not even same manufacturer, let alone matched.. no wonder the machine had issues)
As for space.. Honestly I didn't look because on a pair of 750 gig sata drives it doesn't matter. My guess would be about the same as gentoo.. something like 2 gig + double the amount of ram as a swap file. Of course you can install (or leave out) anything you want.
I would suggest checking out the home page because all I was doing was evaluating a new 64bit system which has been having troubles with graphics drivers and the usual xp(32) issues. Sab was reported to me as working flawlessly on a similar system so it was literally just thrown on and booted.. in both cases I would have liked more than 30 minutes after install to play with it a bit.. but not at home, not my hardware, and both belong to typical know-little windows users who were blaming hardware for what turned out to be driver issues. I left both with the live/install disk and a few little instructions about running from a live disk.
The one thing that really impressed me more than anything was the way I could back up onto dvd the entire windows files without needing to think about mounting the partitions or any of the old tricks.
