I have a SuSE 11.4 computer and my graphics card died on me (no display at all – just 1 long beep followed by 3 short ones on an ASUS P5-ND motherboard). I had been using NVidia’s driver (installed the “hard” way) - not the nouveau driver.
I plan to use an ATI card that we have had lying around for the past year to replace the NVidia one. So, the questions are: When that card is put in, will there be some sort of generic driver that will take over temporarily until I find and install the new driver, or would I have to use the program ‘mc’ (midnight commander)? If that is the case, would I have to save the new driver onto a usb drive from my Windows computer and then get at it from mc?
If it were me, and I had been installing the ‘hardway’ all the time, I would do this. … Note this is based on the assumption that I still have on my hard drive the nvidia .run file (say NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-285.05.09.run) that I used to install the ‘manual way’ (which used to be called the ‘hardway’ (that is not hard)).
I would put in the new graphic card. I would then boot to run level 3, probably with the boot code: ‘nomodeset 3’ .
If that did not work, I would just boot with the boot code ‘3’ .
I would log in to the full screen text mode as a regular user, and change directory to where I have the nvidia .run file (say NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-285.05.09.run) located, and I would then switch to root permissions and send the command:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-285.05.09.run --uninstall
and then when that is complete (assuming no errors) I would then check to ensure I have no /etc/X11/xorg.conf (with the nvidia driver specified) and also check I had no /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file with nvidia specified. If I did I would remove the nvidia specification from those files. Probably even remove the xorg.conf and comment out everything in the 50-device.conf.
Then I would reboot with (root permissions)
shutdown -r now
and reboot.
If the reboot failed at GUI loading I would reboot again with the boot code ‘nomodeset’.
And if that reboot failed at GUI loading I would reboot again with the failsafe option.
Then dependent on the ATI card I would tune the radeon, or radeonhd (if I knew the settings), or even install the proprietary AMD GNU/Linux driver.
Woohoo! I’m back in business!
We were fortunate to find another NVidia card that uses the same driver that I already have installed. The new card is an 8400GS. So now, all is fine again.
I have printed out your instructions so if something happens again, I will have some instructions to follow.
