Thanks to Stan :) for taking the time and effort to respond to my post. I found his suggestions really useful.
I was able to flip to a console in F14 and successfully login to my user account, but sadly I never resolved the graphical login issue where F14 kept redisplaying the user login screen after I had entered my password. I did check the log files, but wasn't able to google much from log file text.
Anyway, have re-installed Fedora 14, and it seems to be working fine now.
The major learning was to make sure that grub is set up correctly asap, prior to doing lots of work on the linux install.
I have a dell laptop and the first non-boot partition is a Dell windows recovery area, so Vista is on (0,2). The default grub.conf setup is set to (0,1), so I edited it as soon as I was able, without letting the Vista boot-up fail. Now I can successfully dual boot and have had no problem with the user login screen on F14.
Barry.
On 01/02/2011 12:22 PM, Barry Keeling wrote:
Anyway, have re-installed Fedora 14, and it seems to be working fine now.
I hope you didn't lose much work. If it happens again, log into a console the way you did, as yourself (not root) and try this:
mv .gnome2 .gnome2.old
This will move all of your Gnome customizations to a backup folder, but not get rid of them completely. Then, log out, go back to your GUI and try again. If it works, you'll have the default Gnome desktop and have to start customizing it again, but that's probably quicker than reinstalling. And, if you're brave, you can move things across from the old to the new .gnome folder one at a time until it stops working to find out which file was corrupt.
The nice thing about this is, if it doesn't work, you can still reinstall with almost no time lost.