The problem occurs after the "linux" button is pressed in the BootX dialog. The video system appears to reset, leaving a screen full of garbage (on my 7600 it consists of colourful stripes). This happens during a successful boot too, presumably due to the delay between BootX handing control to the kernel and the kernel taking interest in the display. The problem is that the boot process then hangs, before the kernel clears the display.

This can happen if the kernel image BootX is loading has been corrupted. BootX tries to boot the kernel image (vmlinux) placed in the BootX folder or the Mac system folder, and this file can be corrupted while it is being copied to the Mac partition. The kernel image can be corrupted if it is downloaded by FTP with a client set to text mode, or if it is copied from a linux partition using the LinuxDisks utility. There many other ways to corrupt a file, but these are probably the most likely. To ensure you have a correct copy of the kernel image, download it in binary mode with an trustworthy FTP client (Fetch and recent versions of Netscape are the only ones I can vouch for under MacOS), or mount the HFS partition under linux and copy your kernel image across partitions that way (to do this you need to have linux installed already, of course).

r.polkinghorne@student.anu.edu.au