Black Screen On Live Boot - SOLVED

[Isthmus]

Hi everyone. I'm trying to live boot on a Dell Inspiron 700m. The machine's specs are 1.8GHZ centrino, 2GB Ram, and 80 GB HD. I have both a live CD and a Live USB Thumb drive and have tested both on other computers and know that both work.

When I boot form either source, I go through the screen giving me the boot options (the one with the count down) and then the OS starts to boot. I see the black screen with the four little dots in the center changing color between white and green. eventually all the dots turn green and disappear and nothing happens. The screen stays black.

I tried running a search and saw the following thread describing what seems to be the same exact problem:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/posting.php ... 46&t=50118

I haven't tried the code string mentioned as a solution in that thread yet. Before I do I have a question. If that solution works, what will I need to do to avoid this black screen problem once I install mint? should I expect the blank screen problem to persist once Mint is Installed? If so will there be a permanent solution (I'm assuming some variant of the one described in the link above) I'll have to input manually? Or should I expect mint to work as it is supposed to once it is installed (as opposed to being live booted?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[beefstu]

If that command does it, you can set it as a boot parameter permenantly.

To do it temporarily so that you can boot the first time, once installed, pon the grub countdown, press 'e' with mint highlighted and add 'nomodeset' just before it says 'quiet splash' then press ctrl-x to boot

then once logged in, in a terminal,

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gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

find the line which says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

and inbetween the ""

write

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nomodeset

save that then back in the terminal

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sudo update-grub

then reboot

[Isthmus]

To do it temporarily so that you can boot the first time, once installed, pon the grub countdown, press 'e' with mint highlighted and add 'nomodeset' just before it says 'quiet splash' then press ctrl-x to boot

Ok I followed your instructions and this is what I'm getting:

1. I load the CD
2. I get the countdown screen.
3. I exit the countdown and are shown the grub screen
4. I'm shown the following five choices:
- Start Linux Mint
- Start Linux Mint (compatibility mode)
- Check the Integrity of the CD
- Memory Test
- Boot from local drive

below that it says press Tab to edit.

5. with "Start Linux Mint" highlighted, I hit e as instructed. nothing happens.
6. I follow the instructions on the screen and hit Tab. The following line of code appears:

/casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/mint.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/ini
trd.lz quiet splash --

7. As instructed I type in nomodeset so that the line of code looks like this:

/casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/mint.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/ini
trd.lz nomodeset quiet splash --

8. I press ctrl-x. nothing happens.
9. I hit return and the boot sequence begins.
10. The boot sequence runs through a few lines of code then the black screen with the five little dots appears. it seems to last longer than before, but eventually all the dots turn green, the screen turns black and the CD stops reading.

I know the disk is good because I checked and I've already loaded mint with no problem on home built computer. The Issue is with this Dell Inspiron 700m laptop. As an aside, I also tried running live CDs of PCLinuxOS (Gnome and KDE) and both experienced the exact same issue. I ran live CDs of the latest releases MoonOS, and OpenGEU, as well as a live USB of Elive and all loaded without problem. I did run PCLOS in safe mode and that did boot, but the screen resolution was really low.

Does this give you guys a little better Idea of what might be going on or what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks again.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________


EDIT

I tried launching the CD in compatibility mode and sure enough, it boots properly, just like PCLOS did when that was booted in Safe Mode. It seems to work, but once again the resolution is low. I hope that points to whatever the culprit might be. BTW, I tried running similar searched on the problem on the PCLOS side of things, and while I didn't find any answers (though I did find a ton of people reporting the problem). I did find several posts in different places which suspected a video driver problem. The only post I found that solved it was this one:

http://wamukota.blogspot.com/2010/06/pc ... -kde4.html

Maybe that points to whatever is going on with Mint on this particular computer?

[beefstu]

ah sorry, forgot you were from live CD, not install. OK, from here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1461029&page=2 it would suggest that

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i915.modeset=1

is what you want to put in, using the same method as you did before. If not, try

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i915.modeset=1 driver=intel

If this works, it can be made to be used every time it boots. Hopefully you'll have the same results as the guys running Ubuntu

[Isthmus]

beefstu, you are a GENIUS!!!!!!!!!!!

The second time around worked.

I typed in the folloaing:

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i915.modeset=1 driver=intel

and it loaded perfectly.

Now, the question is what do I do to make this permanent. Should I just follow your prior instructions for making it permanent and replace 'nomodeset' for 'i915.modeset=1 driver=intel'? I should say that I would like to keep this as a dual boot machine with one OS running for rock solid usability and another running for speed and general eye candy.

If it helps, my plans for this machine are to dual boot M9 with Elive 2.0. I'm thinking that the way to go might be to load eLive and then load mint 9 afterwards - letting M9's partition making wizard handle partitioning the system for both operating systems.

Anyhow, thanks so much for all the help, and for having so much patience with a noob getting started. I hope to one day be able to do the same for someone else.

[beefstu]

Aw shucks

Yeah to make it permanent just follow what I said about nomodeset but obviously with i915.modeset=1 driver=intel instead.

Can you edit your first post and change the subject to include [solved] to help others?

Glad it was solved, I'm sure you'll stumble across a post you'll be able to help with soon!

[zengeek]

beefstu, you are a GENIUS!!!!!!!!!!!

The second time around worked.

I typed in the folloaing:

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i915.modeset=1 driver=intel

and it loaded perfectly.

Now, the question is what do I do to make this permanent. Should I just follow your prior instructions for making it permanent and replace 'nomodeset' for 'i915.modeset=1 driver=intel'? I should say that I would like to keep this as a dual boot machine with one OS running for rock solid usability and another running for speed and general eye candy.

If it helps, my plans for this machine are to dual boot M9 with Elive 2.0. I'm thinking that the way to go might be to load eLive and then load mint 9 afterwards - letting M9's partition making wizard handle partitioning the system for both operating systems.

Anyhow, thanks so much for all the help, and for having so much patience with a noob getting started. I hope to one day be able to do the same for someone else.

I'd have to agree, I've got a Dell D400 (I think)
and I just put Isadora on it.

I had the same problems but now they're fixed, thanks guys...


One thing I had problems with was using update-grub for the live CD terminal. No dice.
I had to boot to the physical install (I think this might be a different situation from yours) and HOLD DOWN BOTH SHIFT KEYS to get the boot menu.
From there I booted to terminal mode and ran the command.
I think one of the options on the boot menu was update grub, but I just wanted to make sure and I did it myself.

After that, MAGIC!!! My ancient work laptop now outperforms my brand new work laptop with win7 on it.

[gryphonB]

After a fascinating couple of days of booting to black, research and editing Grub I found a solution not listed here.

My system is a 2011 vintage i7 laptop with onboard Intel and nVidia graphics. When it encounters the Nouveau driver the 'vomit from all orifices' flag is set. They don't play nice. No, no they don't.
it's been a constant issue since Kubuntu13, first solved with the 'nomodeset' flag, then I found the 'nouveau.modeset=0' flag, which I've used ever since. At one point I wrote a script to automate stuff like editing the boot command line, setting up partitions & persistence the way I like, etc. Since then I've found mkusb does much of this very, very well.

So I was surprised it didn't work with Mint 20. Since my script used the extlinux bootloader I had a look at the ISO's isolinux/isolinux.cfg, which specified a very different compatibility mode: there was no 'iso-scan' setting, and other graphics options.

Here's the Grub Compatibility option line:

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linux     /casper/vmlinuz  file=/cdrom/preseed/linuxmint.seed boot=casper xforcevesa iso-scan/filename=${iso_path} ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw noapic noacpi nosplash irqpoll --

The isolinux Compatibility line:

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append  file=/cdrom/preseed/linuxmint.seed boot=casper xforcevesa nomodeset b43.blacklist=yes initrd=/casper/initrd.lz ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw noapic noacpi nosplash irqpoll --

I deleted the iso-scan setting and added nouveau.modeset=0. Hoorya!

Possibly, the scan just took a long time, and with no kind of progress indicator I just assumed it had hung, but I'm pretty sure at some point I washed the dog, had a shower, cooked dinner, the screen all the while black as your evil heart . . .

BTW, the mkusb persistent disk wasn't persistent, at least from one of the bootloaders. So I may adapt that script.