LiveCD / new install Fails to boot on Dell Laptop [solved]

[River~~]

Affects Dell D400 & D505 laptops and maybe others.

The Mint LiveCD grinds to a halt on some Dell laptops, with a "Black Screen of Death" at about the time when you'd expect to see the Desktop.

If you manage to get a successful install, the same thing happens to the installed system at about the time you'd expect to see the login screen.

This is what you do:

1 LiveCD.

Boot, and while it is counting down the 10 sec till reboot, press Tab twice. A line of text appears on the screen that ends

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quiet splash --

edit this so that it ends

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quiet splash i915.modeset=1 --

and press Enter to allow the boot to continue. If this does work, you will need to do all the following steps. (if not then ignore the rest of this post, I guess)

2 Installation

Click on the icon to install, but do not reboot at the end of the install.

3 Make sure your initial boot will work

At the end of the install process, you are still running the LiveCD software, which has its own filesystem. You don't want to edit the liveCd files, but the files belonging to the new install.

The Mint installer should have put an icon on the Desktop for this. On my laptop it is called "58 GB Filesystem", but yours may be called something else, especially if your disk is a different size....

Both the files we are going to edit need to be from inside this icon, not from the live cd filesystem..

Edit the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg. One way to do this is as follows:

Click on your new filesystem, click on "boot", then on "grub", then right click on "grub.cfg" then "open as administrator".

The file warns you not to edit it. Edit it anyway, or you will need to edit it when you re-boot

Where you see a "quiet splash", add i915.modeset=1 as you did before. Look for a block of lines (maybe around line 80 or so) that start

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### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ###
menuentry "Linux Mint 9, 2.6.32-21-generic   ...

and a few lines later is a line starting with linux. At the end of that add our incantation without changing anything else. Mine looked like this:

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	linux	/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-21-generic root=UUID=6d34c9ee-a8e2-46d2-baf0-1649ad3ef61f ro   quiet splash  i915.modeset=1

4 Make sure the fix is applied to future updates

Edit the file /etc/default/grub, again from within the new filesystem.

The line that says

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

should read

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.modeset=1"

5 Boot into the new system

It now should all work.

acknowledgements

Thanks to many contributors on the Ubuntu forums who helped me to work this out. The Mint CD is slightly different, so step 1 is slightly different from the info posted over there.

None of this info is original from me (standing on the shoulders of giants...), but I thought it would be helpful to re-post it in a beginner friendly tutorial format. Hope it helps someone, and if so please feel free to re-post it anywhere.

edit: added D505 to first line

[Oscar799]

Glad you found a solution

[vincent]

Step 3 is unnecessary and heavily discouraged because you're not supposed to modify the grub.cfg file directly. Rather, you're supposed to edit the Grub config files (e.g. /etc/default/grub and /etc/grub.d/*), and then proceed to run

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sudo update-grub

which will apply the changes you made in those separate Grub config files, to grub.cfg.

[Vietchia]

I'm scratching my head over this one. I modified /etc/default/grub to include "i915.modeset=1", which I was able use to get the live-CD to boot. But, I can't find the file "/etc/grub.d/*". I can find the folder "/etc/grub.d", but no file by that name. Plus, when I try to upgrade grub, I get "/usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: cannot find a device for / (is /dev mounted?)." error.

Mint looks like something I would want to use. Could any of you fine folks reccomend a solution?

[vincent]

You are still working from a live session, correct? In that case, you'll have to chroot into your Mint installation before running update-grub. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2#Recover%2 ... a%20LiveCD (follow the steps up to where it says "sudo chroot /mnt", then stop and continue with what you were doing before)

Don't worry about the files in the /etc/grub.d/ directory, you won't have to mess with them at all if all you have to do is to include "i915.modeset=1" as a boot option.