[Solved]Black screen only after restricted driver

[avatar46]

System specs:
AMD Phenom x4 965be
AMD 6850HD
OCZ Agility3 120gb SSD
2tb Seagate Barracuda.

I'm having issues installing them. I've followed alot of guides/forum posts to no avail, No matter what driver I use I onlt get a black screen upon rebooting back into linux.
It's my only OS on there for the moment.

I've never had this issue on Mint 11 (last one I used) and I switched graphics card through it's life. Is there any thing I can do to fix this?

Thanks.

[Soukyuu]

A similar setup here, but with nVidia 260GTX + crucial m4.
I had a working linux until a few days ago when i did my last update. Not using linux regularly, so I just noticed something broke today: booting up leaves me with a black screen, with the monitor going to sleep mode a few seconds after that.

I thought I'd save myself time debugging and just reinstall... which I did... and once I installed the restricted drivers and rebooted, boom, black screen again. Booted to recovery mode and uninstalled nvidia* -> working again.
Could it be that a new update broke restricted drivers somehow?

[Soukyuu]

I knew I shouldn't have fiddled with BIOS options I don't understand!
avatar46, do you by any chance have IOMMU enabled in BIOS? I just found out that disabling it fixed the issue for me.

Now if only I knew what this IOMMU is and why it breaks restricted drivers...

[avatar46]

Mine is set to disabled by default, :-\
I'm gonna try mint 11 and see what happens.
If not then I don't know what else I can try.

[2029manumathew]

Ok.. Here's my two cents...
Haven't got any high-end gfx cards... havent worried about purchasing one... b'coz intel cards simply work for linux mint...
But yet, starting from Mint 11, I've experienced graphic glitches... like unexplainable blue objects masking the window items.. graphics terribly rendered at times.. and again... the black screen biggy headache...
As far as the former two are concerned, I guess I'll just have to say "I dont know"...
But for the Black Screen Issue, mine was a problem of mint not recognising my screen's native resolution... added with the plymouth (black screen by default from mint 11 onwards) failing to exit out of render mode bcoz of the messed up resolution (I believe this is the reason)... To check whether you have a similar problem as mine... boot into recovery mode...resume normal boot... send the sleep signal (using sleep switch in laptops) when the black screen persists... wake it up again... if you see a messed up resolution, then do the following:
1> Install Grub-Customizer, Plymouth-Manager... (google it up.. ppa's are available)
2> Set the resolution of both grub and plymouth to same resolution... mostly 800x600 works in all cases.... save 'em
3> reboot...

[jamvaru]

It is the latest ATI/AMD updates to the driver
you will have to download a previous version of the driver and install 'manually'
had same problem in recent windows xp update to latest driver
this problem is ongoing with ati/amd... their new drivers are always betas

[avatar46]

Still nothing :/ followed a fair few guides on this, I tried older drivers, I don't think the resolution sticks, is there any other way I can do it from the shell?

[jamvaru]

amd has shell instructions on their site

[avatar46]

Turns out it was a resolution issue after all, I tried a different monitor and for some reason the monitor I use Linux thought it was capable of 1600*1200 (even though it's 1366*768) so after alot of messing in a shell folllowing alot of different guides I managed to get it working. time to make the switch form Win7 :p