Switching from ATI to NVIDIA graphic card caused initscript to break

dontbugme · 2012-01-26 18:06:14

First off, I want to apologize for having to use a random BugMeNot account but the "What is the output of "date -u +%W$(uname)|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'"?" question is literally impossible for me to answer as my Arch Linux system will not boot up.

Well, that aside, I've run into a relatively serious problem. I used to have an ATI card in my system, using the catalyst driver and catalyst-hook to make sure it would keep working after kernel updates but then disaster stroke. My power supply died and dragged my graphic card down with it. After bringing it to a PC store for repair, I now have the NVIDIA GeForce GTX550 Ti card in it. All fine and well, until I wanted to start Arch Linux to remove my catalyst driver and install the NVIDIA one. I started the system, the initscript started to run, did a small part of it's tasks and while processing UDev events it started to spit errors regarding noveau and refused to boot up. (It only showed those errors for a very short time, so it's hard to get the exact error message. I've typed it over from an image I took with my mobile phone and the blurry image may make it possible for this to contain typos)

Error message:

[     4.916398] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: unknown i2c port 51
[     4.916467] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: 0x0447: Failed parsing init table opc
ode: INIT_I2C_LONG_IF -19
[     4.936630] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: unknown i2c port 51
[     4.947042] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: EvoCh 0 Mthd 0x0000 Data 0x00000000 (
0x0001 0x01)

Things I have tried:
- Starting Arch Linux fallback
- Starting Arch Linux on runlevel 1
- Shouting at Arch Linux in frustration

However, all three things resulted in the exact same issue.

If anyone knows what to do or has even the slightest hint, I'd love to know.

Thanks in advance and have a nice day,
- TheLastProject

nexus7 · 2012-01-26 20:52:13

Hm, I'd try to put the nvidia card out and to plug the gfx cable into the socket of your onboard graphics chip, if any.

Then boot into runlevel 3 (text mode) and uninstall the ati drivers. Poweroff, put your nv-card in, boot and install Xorg and the appropriate nvidia driver (just follow the wikis).
If you can't boot into rl3 at all however, edit the grub's command line (or "kernel line") and add single at the and. After booting into runlevel 1 as a single user this way, enter init 3 for rl3. Finally edit /etc/inittab accordingly. -- Alternatively you can edit /etc/inittab with booting your Arch cd, and being chroot'ed.

Last edited by nexus7 (2012-01-26 20:57:14)

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-26 18:06:14

Switching from ATI to NVIDIA graphic card caused initscript to break

#2 2012-01-26 20:52:13

Re: Switching from ATI to NVIDIA graphic card caused initscript to break

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