Black screen startup- ATI Drivers

[ryuanesha]

I have tried on various installations of Mint 9 to install drivers for my graphics card in my new laptop. I have a Mobility Radeon HD 5470 that I wish to use. Trying both the default driver installer and downloading them to install from the site, both leave me with a black screen when I turn on my laptop. I get a splash screen, and it turns black after a few seconds. There is no prompt to log in, or anything after said splash screen. When I turn off my laptop, I see the splash screen again for a few seconds before it turns off. I have waited several minutes without any effect when it is black. Any suggestions?

[proxima_centauri]

You should not try to install the ATI proprietary drivers from the official website. Many cards are depreciated in support.

Open up Hardware Drivers from the menu under Administration, it will tell you if there is a proprietary driver available for your card. If not, your card is likely not supported and you will have to settle for the open-source drivers.

So you do not have an opportunity to log in, whether text based or graphical based?
Can you choose to boot from the recovery mode at grub?

[ryuanesha]

After I install mint, I get a popup saying there are graphics drivers I can install, those have the same effects as the ones from ATI. After I made a second partition, I could finally use the grub menu. After selecting the recovery menu, a few lines of text pop up, but then I get the black screen. I have no option to log in, and on my second partition I set it to auto log me in, still a black screen.

[Dave W.]

Hello,
I pretty much have this same problem I have an HD 5450 switchable graphics card. I got my driver from "Hardware Drivers" I have a feel that I will have to reinstall and not load it if I cannot get the driver to work. Any one have any suggestions? Recovery mode(s) do not work either.

TIA

[proxima_centauri]

If you both could run the command "inxi -Gx" in terminal, and post the results - it would be helpful to know exactly what graphics card we are dealing with.

[Dave W.]

proxima,

Thanks for your quick response. I'm re-installing now. The actual card is a 512 MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450 with switchable graphics.

I could not recover from the black screen until I performed the alt print screen REISUB and then I could get to grub. After I reinstall I will try inxi -GX.

Dave

[Dave W.]

proxima,



Graphics:
Card-1 Intel Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
Card-2 ATI Manhattan [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series] X.Org 1.7.6 Res: 1366x768@60.1hz
GLX Renderer Mesa DRI Intel IGDNG_M GEM 20091221 2009Q4 x86/MMX/SSE2 GLX Version 2.1 Mesa 7.7.1 Direct Rendering Yes

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave W.]

Hello folks,
Can anyone tell me in "newbie speak" if this is a good thing for me and my graphics card? See my previous post.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-ATI- ... 3725.shtml

Thanks,
Dave