fc11 - blank screen at boot after mobo upgrade

[Tod Thomas]

I had an old Epox mobo running with an old Athlon XP chip so I decided
to upgrade.  Before I made this decision I decided to upgrade from fc10
to fc11 using yum.  Upgrade went well, rebooted, everything fine.

After upgrading my Mobo and CPU to an Asus m4a78-em and a sempron 2.7GHz
AM3 chip I booted up.  All my drives are recognized, the grub prompt
comes up (I'm dual booting with windows XP on a smaller drive) and life
seems good until the screen goes blank.  After booting couple of times I
tried using noapic to no avail.  Once more I tried but removed quiet
from the grub kernel line.  This time I see stuff happening but the text
flies by so fast I can't read it, but at least I see the system trying
to boot.

I always upgrade using yum, never had a real problem I couldn't work
out.  I'm using stock LVM, never had a problem there either.  I wonder
if its grub but I didn't want to start messing around until I got a
little advice.  Also, I am dual booting windows on a separate drive.


Any ideas?


Thanks - Tod

[Stefano Cavallari]

On Sunday 17 January 2010 19:07:31 Tod Thomas wrote:
>  I had an old Epox mobo running with an old Athlon XP chip so I
> decided
>  to upgrade.  Before I made this decision I decided to upgrade from fc10
>  to fc11 using yum.  Upgrade went well, rebooted, everything fine.
>  
>  After upgrading my Mobo and CPU to an Asus m4a78-em and a sempron 2.7GHz
>  AM3 chip I booted up.  All my drives are recognized, the grub prompt
>  comes up (I'm dual booting with windows XP on a smaller drive) and life
>  seems good until the screen goes blank.  After booting couple of times I
>  tried using noapic to no avail.  Once more I tried but removed quiet
>  from the grub kernel line.  This time I see stuff happening but the text
>  flies by so fast I can't read it, but at least I see the system trying
>  to boot.
>  
>  I always upgrade using yum, never had a real problem I couldn't work
>  out.  I'm using stock LVM, never had a problem there either.  I wonder
>  if its grub but I didn't want to start messing around until I got a
>  little advice.  Also, I am dual booting windows on a separate drive.
>
>  
>  Any ideas? 
I'd try "nomodeset" (and no "quiet").
If it does not work maybe you can see some boot messages.

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[Tod Merley]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 10:07 AM, Tod Thomas <fr33zone(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  I had an old Epox mobo running with an old Athlon XP chip so I
> decided
>  to upgrade.  Before I made this decision I decided to upgrade from fc10
>  to fc11 using yum.  Upgrade went well, rebooted, everything fine.
>
>  After upgrading my Mobo and CPU to an Asus m4a78-em and a sempron 2.7GHz
>  AM3 chip I booted up.  All my drives are recognized, the grub prompt
>  comes up (I'm dual booting with windows XP on a smaller drive) and life
>  seems good until the screen goes blank.  After booting couple of times I
>  tried using noapic to no avail.  Once more I tried but removed quiet
>  from the grub kernel line.  This time I see stuff happening but the text
>  flies by so fast I can't read it, but at least I see the system trying
>  to boot.
>
>  I always upgrade using yum, never had a real problem I couldn't work
>  out.  I'm using stock LVM, never had a problem there either.  I wonder
>  if its grub but I didn't want to start messing around until I got a
>  little advice.  Also, I am dual booting windows on a separate drive.
>
>
>  Any ideas?
>
>
>  Thanks - Tod
>
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Hi Tod!

Try doing a CTL-ALT-F1 from the blank screen after giving the system a
bit more time to settle.  You should get a tty1 login prompt from
which, if you do log in, you will find yourself in a shell, usually as
yourself.  If this is what happens it is likely that you have a
problem with your video driver or X.  Most likely you will find that
when you compare the /etc/X11/xorg.conf  file existing in your
upgraded version it will be a lot different from what you find in say
a working live CD system.  In any case poking around in your log files
(e.g. /var/log/messages) as well as dmesg (e.g. dmesg >
/home/tod/Desktop/dmesg.txt) may well show some clues.

If it is a grub problem you can usually find a clue by doing an escape
during the attempted boot, indeed most of the time grub will leave a
message on the screen.  Most of the upgrade related grub problems I
have found were incorrect pointers in /boot/grub/grub.conf file
(menu.lst in my currently used distro).  I have found UUID a most
useful way of sorting such things out since a UUID will change only
when the partition is re-formatted while what grub may see as hd0 or
whatever may well change with hardware.

Good Hunting

Tod