[nts] shaaaaaaaaaaarks

[kaberett]

Insight would be appreciated but mostly I'm writing this down this time so's I have it when I come back to this after the weekend. ;)

Deb Jessie. Attempted to upgrade graphics driver. Get through grub & partway through being given updates on what all is happening, then screen goes blank. Alt+Ctrl+Del reboots; Alt+Ctrl+Fn gives me nothing.

This is true regardless of whether or not I boot in single-user mode, and which of the installed kernels I boot using.

Editing the boot option to include "nomodeset" gets me a bit further along but does not finish booting - gets stuck detecting & redetecting the optical mouse. Alt+Ctrl+Fn does switch me to a different tty session but I just get the sad blinky underscore rather than anything useful. Again, Ctrl+Alt+Del does reboot

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1743535 looks helpful - note the para on nvidia cards

Comments

[cjwatson]

May be worth trying init=/lib/sysvinit/init as a boot parameter just in case this is something to do with systemd going haywire.

[kaberett]

alas, same problem. Thanks for the suggestion!

[silveradept]

Which driver, and how are you trying to update it? Is it possible that upgrades have created a problem where the system is trying to boot, say, nouveau when it should be trying to boot nv?

[kaberett]

Yes. I am going to try to get a live stick together to do something useful with attempting to sort it out...

[catyak]

It's not just nVidia, I had hours of fun trying to get an AMD/ATI laptop to give me a display. For some reason, Kubuntu 14.04 worked but Mint 17 KDE didn't want to work even though it's mostly the same. For added fun it didn't like the trackpad either, so I had to plug in a USB mouse to experiment. All working now though, at least until I need to do a significant upgrade...

Can you do ctrl-alt-f2 to get a text terminal screen?

[kaberett]

Switching tty sessions doesn't do anything useful (details in post), alas.

[kaberett]

okay, nomodeset is actually getting me a root prompt, it's just getting buried underneath mouse remountings

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg gets me to a state where the result of doing startx is (rather than just a blank dead screen) the "oops, something went wrong, log out and try again" screen

[kaberett]

aaaaand defeated :-)

A purge of all nvidia drivers and a couple of reboots later, shit's working again HURRAH.

[emperor]

*\o/*