Mageia forum

So I had an old Sony PCV-V300G with a 200GB HD and 1GB Memory running Mageia 5.1.
It was just a toy - so I decided to upgrade the Memory to 2GB and Install from scratch MAGEIA 9 (32 -Bit).
Bad choice it seems. Got through the install fine but the reboot dies on an initial screen with:
small box with 3 question marks - then proceeds to another screen with 3 small boxes with 3 question marks.
Then it moves on to a blank screen with Cursor in Top Left and dies there.
I reinstalled twice - rather painful - to ensure I didn't inadvertently do something wrong - seems to be correct.
No dice - MAGEIA 9 not liking this PC.
So I scrubbed it and reloaded MAGEIA 5.1.
All is working again - no errors.

Why would a newer release crash and burn - any assistance appreciated as afraid to upgrade any further as there was no way to "fix" whatever was wrong.

Newer releases are going to require increased ram and video card performance and cpu speeds. Your computer is far too limited to install any recent linux distribution.

the ??? displayed usually occurs when installing GNOME and the graphics card is not auto-detected, or not sufficient resources to load the Display Manager.

I would suggest, as you have had to use the i586 classical installer or net installer to install 32bit GNOME, that you try a much lighter DE from the install .iso.
Choices are LXDE, Mate, XFCE and LXQT.
PLASMA may work ( it does in my atom based ASUS T100TA, 2GB, dual (duel) booting with win10 no less ).
Both GNOME and Cinnamon are likely too resource hungry.

Thanks Much benmc. I had tried both Plasma & GNOME. Neither would function. I'll stick with Mageia 5.1 as quick & stable.

RAMBLINBOB wrote:small box with 3 question marks - then proceeds to another screen with 3 small boxes with 3 question marks.
Then it moves on to a blank screen with Cursor in Top Left and dies there.

The former is plymouth or the bootsplash - this happens when graphics resolution for framebuffer cannot be determined.
The latter is when graphical server starts, maybe because the graphics card is not supported anymore or for some other issues.

From what I can tell the graphics chip should be SIS 651 - which might not work well anymore with current X server.
You could try alternate drivers like vesa or such but the performance is usually pretty bad.
Check https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Setup_the_graphical_server for selecting a different graphics driver.

Just FYI...
Made the mistake of re-installing M9 with xfce for kicks.
Unfortunately triggers the same issue - behavior.
Again - pc has 2GB memory and 200GB HD with Pentium 4.
All recommended hardware specs met or exceeded.
I've had enough - 5.1 once more and that's it.
Thanks for responding.

It could be interesting to see if Mageia 9 32bit xfce Live boots and works on USB stick.