Hang on boot of new install, graphics symptoms

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hello!

I bought some hardware recently to build a new pc and have been working to try and get openSuse tumbleweed installed and running. Unfortunately I’ve been running into a bit of a graphics snag. Up to now Suse has always figured out my graphics stuff on its own and just worked so this is a new troubleshooting to me.

When booting off the usb/iso, I see for just a second, a flash of vertical blue and green stripes before the regular boot text starts writing to the screen. It is only for a second and from there the installer loads and proceeds normally through the install. Mouse/GUI/all of that looks normal while the install is happening.

After the install completes and I boot from the hard drive however, it gets hung up on that screen with the blue and green stripes, and a large blinking cursor at the top left of the screen. Whatever the installer usb did to get past that point, the installed system doesn’t seem to be doing. This is before I see anything of grub on the screen.

Some stuff I have tried:

  • Typing doesn’t produce anything at the cursor, neither does enter key.

  • Various Ctrl+Alt+F* to try and get a terminal doesn’t change anything on the screen.

  • Switching monitor cables (graphics card and monitor have VGA & HDMI ports in common, also tried the HDMI port on the motherboard)

  • Installing a newer snapshot of tumbleweed
    Tried:
    openSUSE-Tumbleweed-DVD-x86_64-Snapshot20191023-Media.iso
    openSUSE-Tumbleweed-DVD-x86_64-Snapshot20191111-Media.iso

  • Installing Leap 15.1 instead of tumbleweed (same symptom with both)

  • Made sure the xf86-video-ati package is being installed, which according to https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:AMD_video_cards is a match to my video card. (it was already being installed by default)

  • Booting live images: I can boot from several debian-based live images (have not tried the tumbleweed live image yet, it is downloading now) Interestingly they also show a similar screen for a second during the boot (cursor at top left and this time a checkerboard pattern) but like when booting from the Suse installer iso, they are able to resolve it and display normally after a second.

  • The issue shows up before I type in the decryption password to unlock access to the rest of the disk, which leads me to assume the problem is in the boot partition as opposed to some config in the main partition.

  • I’ve also tried doing an install with no disk encryption, with the thought that maybe it was getting hung up at the password prompt before it could decrypt the disk (same issue prevails)

  • Tried installing with network so that it could pull down extra packages if needed. (usually I install first disconnected and then set up network for extra software once I’m satisfied things are configured to what I want)

  • I can boot a live usb to inspect the installed files, but not quite sure what to look for.

Here is a list of the hardware I’m trying to use

Motherboard: ASRock X570 EXTREME4 WIFI AX AM4 AMD X570 SATA 6Gb/s ATX AMD Motherboard
CPU: AMD RYZEN 7 3700X 8-Core 3.6 GHz (4.4 GHz Max Boost) Socket AM4 65W 100-100000071BOX Desktop Processor
Graphics Card: DIAMOND Radeon HD 5450 DirectX 11 5450PE31G 1GB GDDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Low Profile Video Card
Monitor: ASUS VN279QL

Any suggestions are appreciated!

2

Hi and welcome to the Forum :slight_smile:
At grub if you press the ‘e’ key and edit the linuxefi line (the one that has quiet in it if using legacy boot) to include nomodeset (also applicable on install), does this help? Hopefully you have plans to upgrade your graphics card in the future?

3

Thanks for your reply Malcom :slight_smile:

Work got a little busy for me so I didn’t get a chance to play with this again until today in our holiday break here.

I did finally get past the blue/green stripes today, so wanted to share the process that was happening and what I had to do in case it helps anybody else.

The process I was doing for install was:

  • Boot from USB
  • Make install selections
  • Finish selections and begin installation

At this point it takes some time so I’d walk away and do other things while waiting for it to finish. While I was away from the desk, the next sequence would happen

  • Installation proceeds
  • Installation complete
  • Computer restart
  • Boots from usb again (it is still plugged in)
  • USB grub displays on screen
  • Times out on first “Boot from hard drive” option
  • That boot is attempted resulting in green/blue stripes

Turning the PC off at that point, removing the USB drive and turning it back on was enough to let things boot normally, with the grub on my hard drive loading as it should and booting its way on to the OS login screen normally.
So it looks like the USB grub was able to figure things out for the installer but had trouble handing off to the hard drive boot after the restart, but the hard drive grub was able to work it out just fine.

As for the graphics card I don’t really have any plans to replace it. I don’t do a lot of graphics-intensive stuff and onboard intel graphics has always been sufficient for me in the past. (This is my first time using AMD.) This time around I’ve learned that the trend has been to move the onboard graphics to be in the processor as opposed to the motherboard, and the particular CPU I used doesn’t include that feature (learning experience). So I just bought some minimal card with the criteria of it being inexpensive and small and not having a bunch of fans on it to make noise.

The next issue I ran into was with the disk encryption options. Back in the mediocre old days I would manually do the encrypted root partition with an unencrypted /boot next door which would start the boot process and ask the password to decrypt the rest while booting. In the years since the Suse installer got the option to set that up for you and eventually would even encrypt the boot partition, asking the password twice to decrypt the initial boot area then the rest of the system. (There are ways to only type the password once but typing it twice never bothered me.)

This time around though, just selecting the encrypted disk option in the guided partitioned would result in a black screen on boot, no grub, no asking for a password. What I finally had to do was go back to the old-style setup of manually creating an unencrypted /boot partition and an encrypted /. After doing that, grub could load and I got the normal password prompt to decrypt the rest of the drive. So looks like I need to learn something about the booting process nowadays to understand how to manually set it up with /boot encrypted too.

Now my activity is to start rolling along with the tumbling tumbleweeds and get the first set of updates. The word online seems to be that the right method in tumbleweed is
https://lwn.net/Articles/717489/

zypper dup --no-allow-vendor-change

so I’ve been trying with that. I’m running into a couple of issues there, not really blocking progress, just slowing me down. May ask in a new thread if I get too frustrated we’ll see :slight_smile:

So yep, in summary some challenges, but poking my way along bit by bit and enjoying this new tumbleweed world.

4

Hi
Glad you have it up and running, it’s just zypper dup, once you change a package to vendor X it won’t swap back unless you choose to, this has been default for awhile now…

5

That makes things simpler. I’ve really been spoiled by Yast for software management - that interface is so fantastic, I never updated on the command line before for a Suse distro.

Update issue I was wrestling with was the curl thing mentioned in several other threads, the solution in these ones straightened me out -
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/538343-Segmentation-fault-with-zypper
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/535230-zypper-segfaulting/page5?highlight=zypper+seg

6

No fans to wear out and get noisy, besides low price, is how I chose my two HD 5450s. They were acquired before I determined considerably better values can be had from eBay. :stuck_out_tongue:

# pinxi -GxxSza
System:    Host: big41 Kernel: 5.2.14-1-default x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 9.2.1 
           parameters: root=LABEL=##### ipv6.disable=1 net.ifnames=0 noresume mitigations=auto consoleblank=0 vga=791 
           video=1440x900@60 3 
           Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.17.3 tk: Qt 5.13.1 wm: kwin_x11 dm: startx Distro: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20191126 
Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series] vendor: PC Partner Limited 
           driver: radeon v: kernel bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 1002:68f9 
           Display: server: X.Org 1.20.5 driver: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa alternate: ati compositor: kwin_x11 
           resolution: 2560x1440~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD CEDAR (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.2.14-1-default LLVM 9.0.0) v: 3.3 Mesa 19.2.6 compat-v: 3.1 
           direct render: Yes
# xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2560 x 1440, maximum 8192 x 8192
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-I-1 connected primary 2560x1440+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 598mm x 336mm
   2560x1440     59.95*+
...

As you can see, it will do 2560x1440 connected via dual-link DVI, but max res is only 1920x1200 via HDMI. With dual displays I can’t get either one past 1400x1050, which I suspect is due to too little video RAM. Lspci -vv reports only 256MB@d0000000. It does what it needs to do with a single display, work, not games.