[Staffslug] SuSE 10.3 poser

I have been running, very successfully, a SuSE 10.3 set up on one of my PC's. Briefly it has, 256mb of RAM (I know, not really ideal), AMD K7 500mhz, 80gb hard drive, 64mb nVidia MX4000 graphics card, old ISA Creative Soundblaster (32mb AWE), sorry I cannot remember what the mobo is at this moment in time. So, the scenario is that it has run fine for ages (as in a day or two after 10.3 was released). It has been updated without a hitch. Then, a couple of days ago I had to reboot it (I forget why but it wasn't a majorly important thing..something like having to change the power socket over to a surge protected one I think). It seemed to be ok until it got to a point somewhere in the boot up procedure when it simply hung.....all night. I tried again and it did it yet again. This time in a different place. I got the nVidia splash screen but it was jumbled up and distorted. This has happened both pre and post update for the nVidia driver (official download from the nVidia repository). So, my first thoughts were dodgy nVidia driver maybe? Next step I popped the 10.3 DVD into the drive and did a rescue system (from the install menu not the first one, there is a difference). Bingo! I thought as it loaded successfully. I tried a reboot without the DVD to make sure and it was back to square one, i.e. not booting. Back in with the DVD and this time I tried the boot from hard drive option (again, from the installation menu not the first one). Again it worked fine. So, I can either leave the DVD in and boot it that way. Or, I can try to find out what is going on and fix it properly. Now, being as this is a none critical machine I can go either way, it doesn't matter as there is no data that is important on there. Me being me though I would like to learn about what is going wrong. So far I have run Memtest for 24 hours - all passed with zero errors. I have run various hard drive, graphics card and mobo diagnostic tests all passed again. My next step is to swap out the nVidia driver for the open source nv one to see if it's that. In the meantime, any other suggestions of what, where to delve to see what's up with it? -- ============================================== Kevan Farmer Linux user #373362 Staffordshire