nvidia 8600m gt black screen

[space_cowboy1985]

Hi,

I posted a while ago, and have made some progress. But find myself needing help at a different stage. Im running nvidia 8600m gt on an aspire 5920 gt. I have found that the 173.14.28 do work. But it appears that they are not allways being booted up. 9 times out of 10 I just get a black screen. Every know and then it will boot fine and everything works perfectly.

Im assuming that the driver is not allways being booted. And need to check what is being booted and how to make so that only the one i want is. But I dont have a clue how to do that in linux.

Any help would be appreciated.

[dawgdoc]

If you are using LM 9/Isadora or possibly LMDE, you may be having trouble with kernel modesetting.

If you are using LMDE, check HERE.
If you are using LM 9, check HERE.

[space_cowboy1985]

Hi,

thanks for your post. Im afraid its going a bit over my head... Im trying to learn linux lol but this screen issue is causing a catch 22. If possible could you dumb it down.

[dawgdoc]

To be of more help than what is present in the links, I will need to know:

What version and edition of Mint are you using?
What is your graphics chipset?
At what point do you get a black screen? After pushing the power button, after the Grub2 menu, after the log-in screen?

If you want to try this, when/if the screen where you select from Mint, Recovery Mode, MemTest, etc appears you hit the e key, or at least I do on the first release of LMDE. Some text will appear below the boot choices. At the end of the last line of that text, but before the two dashes --: type nomodeset Below this there will be instructions on what to do to proceed with booting, probably to press <enter>. If the instructions saw otherwise, do what they say. If this does not work then the above links will guide you to instructions for specific hardware.

[space_cowboy1985]

Hi dawgdoc,

Thanks for replying.

Im on Julia,
My chipset is Intel PM965,
I get the black screen after the grub, it starts loading and then the screen goes black.

I hit the e at the grub2 at got another menu, it was different to what you described. It had a box at the top with a list of things like /boot/...... which I could edit.

And at the bottom it had press ctrl x to boot ctrl c to cancel and tab to bring up another list menu. I entered the nomodeset into the box and hit ctrl-X but it just booted the same old. Although I didnt have much of a clue as to what i was looking out for.

[dawgdoc]

I entered the nomodeset into the box and hit ctrl-X but it just booted the same old. Although I didnt have much of a clue as to what i was looking out for.

Do you mean that after you entered nomodeset and then hit ctrl-X it booted in a normal manner, or that it gave you a black screen like it has normally been doing 9 out of 10 boots?

If it booted into the log-in screen and then the desktop, you will have to make the nomodeset kernel parameter permanent, otherwise you will have to do this on each boot. HERE to make permanent.

If it went to the black screen instead of fully booting, some intel chipsets require these parameters instead of nomodeset

you need to enter i915.modeset=1 intel=driver into the screen while in the startup phase

from HERE follow the same principles as above to make it permanent.

[space_cowboy1985]

Hi,

I ment boot to black screen sorry.

I tried the intel thing but no joy.

[dawgdoc]

I would suggest that one of the times in which it does boot that you check the dmesg output (run dmesg in terminal) and check the output for errors. you may even want to output it to a text file and then save the text file on a usb flash drive.

Code: Select all

dmesg > dmesg.txt

It will be a lengthy output

Also, after you downloaded the mint iso file, did you do a md5sum check? Then burn the disk at a slow speed?

You may also want to search the forums using terms such as 8600 pm965 boot

Using 8600 and boot* I found THIS

Any idea what might be causing this? It works sometimes, but sometimes doesn't, and it is very frustrating as I want to run Linux Mint, and the only way I can get it to work is by booting it off of the LiveCD.

EDIT: Booting with the option ACPI=OFF solved my problem

[space_cowboy1985]

Hi,

The ACPI did not work either. I tried going recovery and I get a grey screen with black lines down it if that helps.

I can re-format, so that I get in with standard drivers to get any details if needed.