Arch Linux

Sotanaht

Member

Registered: 2012-01-14

Posts: 29

System freezing at startup after switching ATi card for nVidia

EDIT: It seems there is somebody having what might be the same issue.  I think it might be nouveau and my card not playing nicely together.  You can just pretend this thread doesn't exist for now, I'll leave it up in case we're actually having different issues.

After replacing my ATi video card with an nVidia card, my system freezes in the same spot whenever I attempt booting.  This is as far as it gets

 Decompressing Linux... Parsing ELF... done.
Booting the kernel.
:: Starting udevd...
done.
:: Running Hook [udev]
:: Triggering uevents...done.
INIT: version 2.88 booting

> Arch Linux

> http://www.archlinux.org

-------------------------------
:: Adjusting system time and setting kernel timezone           [DONE]

It never goes further than setting the time.

Before swapping the cards, I was running catalyst, using catalyst-generator.  So I used pacman to uninstall lib32-libdrm, lib32-libpciaccess, netkit-bsd-finger, xinetd, catalyst-3.2-ARCH, catalyst-generator, catalyst-utils, and lib32-catalyst-utils, and then installed xf86-video-nouveau and noveau-dri.  I added nouveau to the MODULES array in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.  I also went ahead and deleted my xorg.conf file, which was generated by catalyst, and removed nomodeset from /boot/grub/menu.lst.

I don't really know what to try at this point.  Trying to boot in Single User Mode changed nothing, and if I swap the cards back out, I'm not going to have the necessary drivers for the ATi card.  Please help

EDIT: If I screwed up badly when I was uninstalling/installing packages, and I should have done something differently instead, I did do a full system backup beforehand, so I could just revert to that.

Last edited by Sotanaht (2012-05-16 17:11:38)

Sotanaht

Member

Registered: 2012-01-14

Posts: 29

Re: System freezing at startup after switching ATi card for nVidia

Okay, I ended up replacing nouveau with the nvidia proprietary drivers.  I did a full update of my system, which I hadn't been able to do in over a month because of catalyst's conflict with xorg, and managed to get X working (sort of).  The only issue is that once X starts, and brings me to slim, the keyboard ceases to respond.  If I turn the numlock on before X starts, it turns off as soon as X starts.  Ctrl-Alt-Delete doesn't do anything either.  Not really sure where to go from here other than to switch to vesa or something

EDIT: I tried installing the beta driver as well, but nothing changed.

Last edited by Sotanaht (2012-05-17 00:00:59)

shefla

Member

From: France

Registered: 2010-03-05

Posts: 19

Re: System freezing at startup after switching ATi card for nVidia

Hi Sotanaht,

Please check you have installed keyboard packages for X.
> pacman -Qs | egrep "xf86-input-keyboard|xf86-input-evdev"

You can also try to start X without config file.
Rename /etc/X11/xorg.conf in whatever you want (to be able to revert it back) and restart X.

Did you get a chance to properly run X with nouveau driver ?

Regards

Sotanaht

Member

Registered: 2012-01-14

Posts: 29

Re: System freezing at startup after switching ATi card for nVidia

I've actually gotten X to work again, but with one quirk.  At startup, it gives me the [FAIL] message when it's starting SLiM.  SLiM actually does start successfully, but when I log in, I get a black screen.  I have to open tty1 and run startx to get X to work properly.  At shutdown, SLiM does not terminate when the TERM signal is sent.

I can probably fix this on my own, but it's such a minor issue that I just haven't gotten around to it yet.