intel DQ965GF and nVidia PCI woes

[Ian Malone]

On 01/08/07, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/1/07, michael <cs at networkingnewsletter.org.uk> wrote:
> > Folks, I'm new to Fedora so please excuse anything I'm ignorant about!
> > Having said that, I've been Googling about and trying different things
> > for a couple of days so I think it's now time to ask the experts (you!).
> >
> > I've got a new box, it's got a intel DQ965GF mobo, with 2 SATA disks
> > (LVM) and came with Fedora 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 running on it. I wanted to
> > put my old nVidia geForce fx 5200 (PCI card) into it to allow me to use
> > both my TFTs. However, when I do this it gets to the GRUB menu, starts
> > to load a kernel (is that the right phrase) and then falls over. If I
> > leave the card in but tell the BIOS to use the internal graphics it
> > boots okay. But when return BIOS to auto detect or explicitly use the
> > nVidia card it falls over during boot. I've tried appending
> >  acpi=off
> >  pci=nommconf
> > at the end of the GRUB boot command but with no success. Generally the
> > failure messages say (at about the time there's agpgart messages):
> >   general protection fault 0000[1] SMP
> >
> > I'm at a loss as to why it's not working!
>
> Most likely the motherboard was never meant to boot with an external
> graphics card.
>

While I can't suggest what might be wrong (maybe see
if it's possible to boot to runlevel 3: add the single digit '3' at
the end of the kernel line), it sounds like the motherboard is
happily starting up with the graphics card, and if the BIOS
has an option to not use an add-on card then it it's natural
to think the flip side is to use one.  Sounds like a driver issue.

The OP doesn't have two displays plugged in by any chance?
(And by that I mean two cables, even if they go to the same
monitor.) The nv driver doesn't like doing dual-head.

-- 
imalone