Screen goes blank when booting unless 'x11failsafe' is used

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

Indeed I’m a newbie. Here’s my problem:

-The machine is a brand spanking new Acer AM1201-E1621A
-Graphics: ATI Radeon 2100
-Monitor is Acer x183H

Installation proceeds fine until reboot when automatic configuration goes to work on hardware. A little popup window says “The system will now probe the graphics card. The screen may flicker during this process.” A count down occurs, it goes to text mode, I’m told not to panic, and then the screen goes blank and never comes back.

When I eventually reboot (because I have no idea what else to do), I am presented with three boot options:

-OpenSUSE 11.1 - 2.6.27.7.9
-Failsafe – OpenSUSE 11.1 - 2.6.27.7.9
-Floppy

If I select the first option, I get a green screen that says OpenSuse with a progress bar under it. When the bar is approximately half way through, the screen goes blank and never comes back.

If I select the ‘Failsafe’ option, everything loads up fine.

If I take the first option, but type in ‘x11failsafe’ to the line that says ‘Boot’ under all the selectable options (that’s in addition to the command ‘vga=0x31a’ which is already there), everything loads up fine.

If I run ‘sax2’, my graphics card appears to be correctly identified. There is something a bit strange about the monitor though it is identified as ACR … , not Acer. If I try to set the resolution of the monitor to the manufacturer’s specification: 1366x768, the screen goes blank.

If I just work with the system that results from booting with ‘x11failsafe’, the screen’s a bit blurry and it makes it hard to work for prolonged periods.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Best,

Adrian

(A side note: the computer has no floppy drive and if I select that boot option a message confirms this, somehting to the effect of “the drive does not exist”)

2

I am having the exact same problem and can’t get anywhere with it!!! I am running a 2.53GHz P4, 512M RAM, Dual boot XP Home with GRUB Bootloader, ATI Radeon 8500DV

ANY HELP WOULD BE GREAT!!!

Also I have no sound either way with a Sound Blaster Audigy OEM from Gateway.

3

Actually, based on the thread that you already have going, your problem is NOT exactly the same.

Please check the other thread where I am trying to help you.

4

I think if you have to log in with x11failsafe that it is using the ‘vesa’ driver. At least that’s how it works in my case with nVidia 6150 graphics on board my ASUS M2NPV-VM mother board. Maybe this will help:

ATI - openSUSE

5

I recommended to gqpolo twice, in another thread, that they try the vesa driver, and they ignored my suggestion, … or if they tried it, they did not advise as to its success. Its very difficult to help a user who ignores one suggestions, and tries other ideas, and asks for feedback on ideas one did not suggest. …

6

Using the default grub option would fail for me as well on openSUSE 11.2 unless
I also used the x11failsafe boot parameter. The resulting resolution would be
1024x768. My video card details are 'RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series] on a Toshiba
L300D-10Q Satellite laptop.

After looking around on the internet the following option worked for me:-

Boot using the default grub option with the ‘init 3’ parameter. In my case all
the options were:-

init 3 vga=317

Login as root and type:-

sax2 -r -m 0=radeon

This worked for me, sax2 seemed to probe the card, with a different driver,
presented a screen of the right resolution - 1280x800 - and asked for
confirmation. Now if this works for you type …

init 5

Now you should have the GUI login screen. When you restart the computer you
shouldn’t need to use the x11failsafe option again. I’ve just done this change
and seems to be working for me now when I restarted the machine, I’ve got a lot more screen area.

Good luck.