[SOLVED] Blank screen on boot

[ScoReb]

Hello,
I never posted here about the problem I was having but solved it after reading some other posts here. Thank you! I thought I would post it here in case someone else is having a similar problem.

About 3 months ago I partitioned my 1TB SSD drive that my Windows 7 was installed on and installed LM20.2 64 bit flawlessly onto the new partition. I've been loving it until a couple days ago when I had a hard lock up while trying to post a pic to google maps in Chrome. After several minutes and no response, I performed a hard restart. Everything seemed normal. Returned to google maps where I had left off and things began to get unstable again. Another hard lock up. I did another hard restart. This time though, I just got a blank screen booting to Linux. On Windows boot I'd get Microsoft splash screen then it would go blank. Neither would load.

My first thought was something screwed up with the Grub menu since that's where boot instructions start. I found I could boot into a live session via CD in compatibility mode only and also found I could boot to Windows via safe mode. That's when I started poking around here. Saw some others with blank screen problems and graphics driver was mentioned as a possible cause of the problem. That made sense with my problem as I could boot to safe mode with horrible graphics.

With that, my core i5 processor came with Intel on board graphics which I wasn't using. I have an older Radeon AMD 7000 series card I was using instead. So as a test, I enabled on board graphics and move my monitor cable to the on board output. Cha-Ching!!! Back in business! Both OS's working again. I probably wouldn't have figured it out without the help of the Linux wizards here. Thanks.

Best I can figure, the hard restarts must have corrupted something on the graphics card. Both Linux and Windows could see the card in hardware lists and reported device ok. Also both reported drivers up to date and installed correctly. Still, no output from card.

Oh well. Good excuse to upgrade my graphics card finally. Needless to say, I won't be going to google maps anymore!

I hope this helps somebody.