I need help fixing black screen after bootup when incorrectly switching GPU drivers.

[DefinitelyRus]

First, some context. I'm running Linux Mint 20 and Windows 10 on separate SSDs (1TB & 500gb respectively) on my ASUS TUF A15, which has Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon graphics and an RTX 3050 Laptop. The previous night, I switched to power-saving mode (Radeon GPU) as I was writing a document without a charger. When I finished, I switched it back to performance mode (Nvidia GPU), but instead of logging out and back in as it instructed, I opted to shut down the system instead thinking it would switch to Nvidia GPU next time I logged on, but it never got past the loading screen.

It went through the usual bootup sequence after selecting Mint in Grub. Some terminal text that appears every time I boot up, then the Mint loading logo appears, the brightness adjusts, then a text cursor appears at the top left for a few seconds, and then nothing. Everything up until the very last one (black screen) is normal and happens every time I boot Mint.

I'm not yet 100% sure if this is the cause of the issue but I can't think of anything else as everything I did that day were nothing out of the ordinary. I didn't update any drivers either.

Here's what I tried so far:

• Normal power off. (Pressed power button)
• Forced power off. (Held power button for 5 seconds)
• CMOS cleanup thing? (Held power button for 60 seconds, then it rebooted a few times before starting normally.)
• Started Mint with nvidia.modeset=0 radeon.modeset=0
• Tried sudo rmmod nvidia in recovery mode but it says modeset_nvidia and something else was using it, even if I used nvidia.modeset=0 in recovery mode as well.
• Unplug all IO devices, including the charging brick.

If at all possible, I don't want to reinstall Mint right now because I have some 100-300Gb of files I do not have backups of. I can move the most important ones to WIndows using DiskInternals Linux Reader but I don't have enough storage to move the big files anywhere else. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[deepakdeshp]

Backups is a must, the disk may crash any time. You also have to test the backup.

[SMG]

The previous night, I switched to power-saving mode (Radeon GPU)

Welcome to the forum, DefinitelyRus.

Are you sure the modes switched by just logging out and logging in again? Normally, one must reboot the computer to switch modes because the drivers load at boot time.

I thought that was the same with LM20 (because that is the case with later point versions), but maybe LM20 was different and I'm just not recalling that.

[*]Started Mint with nvidia.modeset=0 radeon.modeset=0
[*]Tried sudo rmmod nvidia in recovery mode but it says modeset_nvidia and something else was using it, even if I used nvidia.modeset=0 in recovery mode as well.

I do not know what you were trying to do with either of those options.

If one wants to boot without drivers loading then one should use nomodeset or one should, at the grub menu, go to Advanced Options and select a kernel with (recovery mode) after it.

My guess is you may have made changes in the Nvidia X Server settings app and saved them which created a custom xorg.conf file. Check the output of

Code: Select all

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

That file should not exist, so remove it if it does and see if that corrects the issue.

Code: Select all

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

If that does not correct the issue, please boot with your installation usb/dvd and provide us with information about your system. open the System Reports app and click the System Information tab on the left. Your computer's information should come up in the right pane. Then click Copy, and paste the results into a reply window here so we can see how Linux Mint views your hardware.