Help: Install on AMD 64 creates display wash

Rory Gleeson rory at childwelfare.ca
Wed Jun 2 09:59:58 UTC 2004


Still no luck getting rid of the graphical wash when booting Fedora.  Any 
other suggestions would be really welcomed!

To recap, I can load Fedora 2 in full graphical mode on to my new AMD64 
Athlon/K8V se Deluxe/ATI Radeon 9200SE without any problems.

However, when I got to boot it, it will start out fine, Grub appears, the 
text starts to roll and the Fedora (press "i" for Interactive...) appears 
and then my screen goes away in colour.

As suggested below, I also edited Grub, removing "rhgp quieton."  This was 
initially helpful, as it brought me past the Fedora (press "i" for 
Interactive...) text and the text kept rolling along right up until the 
desktop was supposed to kick in.  Then, the screen went awash, again.

I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware issue with the ATI card, as suggested, 
below.  I can load MandrakeMove, SuSE Live and XP Pro on to the box without 
any problems.

Based on another suggestion, in my K8V bios, I turned off USB legacy 
support, which now allows me to boot in to another couple of distros that I 
couldn't before.  As an experiment, I also turned of APM and ACPI but it 
didn't help.  ACPI 2.0 has always be disabled.

I have a feeling this is a very small problem I simply can't identify.

I'm a newbie, so this is pushing me to the edge of my skillset already and 
making me wish I stuck with Intel, to be honest.  I'd really appreciate any 
tips or possible advice.

Tired and spent,
Rory



====
On Mon, 2004-05-31 at 20:11, Rory Gleeson wrote:
 > Any quick help that can be provided would be most welcomed!
 >
 > PROBLEM: After successfully installing FC2 32bit, on reboot, graphical load
 > screen goes awash in colour.

I have a Radeon 9000 in my K8V Deluxe and it has been running both 32
and 64 bit versions of FC2 T1-3 and now is running FC2 final with no
problems...my son has an MSI Neo with a Radeon 9600 in it and it is
running 64 bit FC2 without problems also.

First, I would check to make sure that the AGP card is fully seated in
its slot and that it is perpendicular to the plane of the MB...a slight
tilt can cause odd problems, particularly in a case that isn't very
square.  Sometimes it is necessary to slightly bend the bulkhead plate
to make sure the card is properly seated.  Also, make sure the card lock
is properly engaged.  Remember, pull the plug on the power supply before
messing with things in any slot...the motherboard is powered up
otherwise even though the processor isn't..the green led in the lower
front corner of the mb will be off if the system is completely powered
down.

If that doesn't help, I have a suggestion with 2 variations...both
involve editing the grub stanza before booting.

When the Grub menu comes up, move the selection to the kernel/system you
want to boot (ie Fedora Core) and press the letter e (for edit) and move
the selection to the line with rhgb quiet on it...backspace those 10
characters out and then hit escape and then b to boot the system.  This
will leave you in text mode until the system really needs to go to the
graphics mode login screen.  This will give you an idea of whether there
are other issues preventing the system from getting to the point where
it actually needs to do the video mode change into a graphics
mode...perhaps you'll get lucky and by skipping the RHGB screen, the
problem will go away.  If, instead, you don't get a graphical login
screen displayed, Alt R Alt R will get the system to reboot if
everything other than the video card is really running properly.

At this point, you can do the same thing as above but also add a space
and the number 3 after removing the rhgb quiet stuff...this will boot
you into runlevel 3 (text mode with networking) where you can log in and
look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log for any clues about the problem.  If you are
not familiar with vi or emacs, use less to view the log file and nano to
modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf as necessary, first making sure to save a
backup of the original as something like xorg.orig.conf.  Since it seems
at least 640x480 graphics are running, you could eliminate all
resolutions but that one and see if it plays...anything can run that
mode unless it is totally borked.  At least that will get you to a point
where you can start further debugging.

HTH,
KAS







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