Hi all,

I'm a very inexperienced Linux user using laboratory computers. As an added bonus, we have no support staff experienced with Linux to help, so I'm crossing my fingers that a kind soul here can help out.
Today I was attempting to set up dual monitor display (as one continuous desktop) on our Redhat5 OS computer. I followed a guide at this link:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/014dec05/features/multihead/

This seemed simple enough, so I followed the instructions under "Configuring the system for the second monitor on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Fedora Core 4," since the Red Hat 5 interface appeared to be identical (was this a first mistake?)

After I clicked "ok" I rebooted the graphics system with a command I was too foolish to write down (it involved an X, perhaps X11?)

I received an error describing that it could not boot this X system properly. I said "ok" when it asked if I wanted to see the log. This log suggested that I check wiki.x.org for help. It then asked if I wanted to see a detailed log, to which I said "ok," and it simply repeated the same suggestion. I rebooted the computer, and instead of loading the familiar RedHat 5 GUI-type desktop etc, it showed a black screen with a login prompt for username (after the screen blinked about 3 times), followed by a password prompt. I had never seen this before. I logged in this way, and it remained in the black screen mode instead of returning to the GUI format. Since I didn't know any better, I rebooted the computer again. To my knowledge, I modified absolutely nothing else, and suddenly as the system was trying to boot it returned the following error message:

Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
No volume groups found
Volume group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to access resume device (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01)
mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or director
setuproot: error mounting /proc: no such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to Kill init!


I have searched guides online that have similar or identical messages (except for OS version) and I come to a couple of conclusions:
1) These often have occurred in response to swapping hard drives (which I clearly did not) or loading new operating systems. I did not do this, but as a side note, I attempted to reinstall RH5 from disk and the reinstall failed as well.
2) Many of the solutions involve techniques and terminology and assume a certain a priori knowledge that I do not have, so I refrained from implementing them given that each situation appears to have a different solution.

Any help with this situation is greatly appreciated; I will do my best to learn approaches to implementing solutions people may have.
Thanks a lot,

J.M

If the settings were not correct for the second monitor x might not start correctly and you would be dropped to a command line interface. However, the other errors do not relate to the x server problems.
FYI dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 is your swap partition which is part of a Logical Volume Management (LVM) partition. It appears that something caused the filesystem to become corrupted but difficult to tell.. Since you tried to reinstall and failed it is difficult to say what state your drive is at the moment. As a newbie I would reinstall but make sure that you select to reformat the partitions.

Once you get things back up and running we can figure out how to setup muli monitors again. Hopefully there isn't any data that needs to be recovered.