[SOLVED]Downgraded xorg and installed fglrx - can't boot

[VoltManEXE]

Hello everyone. I could really use some help here. I needed to get HDMI output working on my laptop, but I have an ATI Radeon HD 4200 Series video card. As a result, I had to downgrade my xorg to version 1.12 in order to install the legacy fglrx driver, as the open source drivers do not support output to HDMI very well. To do so, I used the guide found here and ran the following commands:

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sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fglrx-legacy

Unfortunately, after a reboot, I find I am no longer able to use my computer. All I see is a black screen with no error messages, and no combination of keypresses does anything. Oddly enough, now when the computer boots, I can now see the Linux Mint logo along with 5 dots during the boot sequence. Before now, I had never seen this logo while booting my computer.

Please, if anyone can help me, it would be greatly appreciated. I really need to be able to use my computer without loosing any files still on the hard drive.

Thank you very much.

[catweazel]

This is a one off to make sure it works: When you boot, Grub2 should allow you to edit the kernel command line. You need to use that facility and change this:

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quiet splash

to this:

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quiet splash nomodeset

If that works then I'll show you how to set it permanently.

[VoltManEXE]

I don't think I can do that. The only thing I am able to do is hold ESC while booting to get to Grub2's OS selection screen. I can press "c" to get to a command line from there, but how would I go about changing that value as you said?

[VoltManEXE]

So it looks like I was able to do what you said, by pressing "e" on the distro and adding "nomodeset" behind "quiet splash." Then I pressed CTRL+X to boot. Unfortunately, this didn't help with anything. All it does now is boot in a sort-of recovery mode, where the text is huge, and I can see the words "Linux Mint 14" in the middle in plain text with 5 dots below it. After that goes away, I still have a black screen and I am unable to boot.

What can I do now?

[VoltManEXE]

I ended up having to fix it myself. No amount of boot parameters I added to Grub2 did anything, so I had to boot into recovery mode, run a text-only terminal as root, remount the system as readable, uninstall the driver from earlier, and reconfigure xorg.conf. The only problem is, I find that now my monitor is running at about half its original refresh rate. I trust that problem will be solved when I install a new video driver, which I'll need anyway if I want HDMI to work, so I'll just go make a new thread for that.