7days, No Luck, No Mint...

[cswalker]

Hey everyone. New to mint and having tons of trouble. Every Live-Cd (knopix 5.1.1, ubuntu 6.06, ubuntu 7.10 standard, 64bit, alternate, Fedora, MINT 4) I have boots fine and dandy on all my laptops and school machines, but I cant get any distro to work on my home system.
Asus p5n32-sli deluxe
pentium e6600
2GB ram
2x geforce 7950gt-sli

with every attempt i end up with a flashing text cursor in the top right corner and then a black screen. I can CTRL+ALT+F1 for the terminal
I have booted with all these options in every combination with the same outcome.
noapic
nolapic
noacpi
acpi=off
break=off
break=up
break=down
nosplash
splash=0

in terminal i have backed up /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and altered monitor settings found on the this and other forums.
STARTX in terminal results: server is already active for display 0.
I have disabled all Bios Options and Enabled all Bios Options. I have the latest Bios (non-beta)
I have disabled and enabled SLI.

I really prefer the mint distro and would love to get this working. As you can probably tell i'm going stir crazy with this. Its been 1week+1day since i started.
ANY HELP WOULD BE APPRECIATED (except alternate-cd ubuntu: don't see the point of installing if it doesn't work)

[Husse]

Welcome to Mint cswalker
You could have a better start - but remember the forum is there to help you

STARTX in terminal results: server is already active for display 0.

This means that you've ended up with a working system (sort of) but where you should not be
This is, as I think you already have guessed, a graphics problem. In Mint Envy is installed by default so it's easy to install the nvidia driver
First when you end up in a terminal try Ctrl+F7 (the Control key and the F7 function key) This should get you into a GUI, but as you have problems you may get
server is already active for display 0
If so issue Envy and you will be guided through an install of the nvidia driver and then be able to boot into the GUI

[puba62]

I experienced the same problem, which I didn't have running Cassandra or Celena, and tried everything i could think of. After digging and digging I finally found a solution to my problem.... it ended up being a monitor detection problem (refresh rate was set too high) and it occurred in standard and XFCE editions.
Boot with "break=bottom" option

At command prompt:
chroot /root nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Change lines:
HorizSync 30-70
VertRefresh 50-160

TO:
HorizSync 28-51
VertRefresh 43-60

Ctrl-o
enter
ctrl-x
exit

after this I got a normal boot