Arch Linux

yayachiken

Member

Registered: 2014-06-19

Posts: 2

Thinkpad T61 boots into scrambled screen, persistent through reinstall

Hello everyone,
after two years of smooth sailing under Arch I finally had to register here because one issue has me stumped.

During an upgrade my Thinkpad T61 just stalled, i.e. refused any input, the screen completely froze, so I turned it off. During the reboot, after some time, when the display manager should appear I get a scrambled screen (unfortunately, I have no camera, so I can't provide a screenshot of that, it has a frozen image of colored stripes running vertically across the screen). The screen refuses input as well, to be exact: I can't switch to a tty. My first instinct was that it is a hardware issue, but I can boot both an Arch Live-System as well as a GUI-Live-System (Linux Mint). Those show no issue, and work just fine.

Because I didn't want to bother too much with troubleshooting, I just tried reinstalling my system, i.e. erasing the root partition, only keeping /home. But the laptop shows the same issue after the reinstall, even though *all* binaries and config files have been changed (except those created by myself, as indicated in the Installation Guide from the Wiki). In hindsight, reinstalling might have been a bad choice, because it is now impossible to provide any logs etc. of what was upgraded...

I also ran badblocks on my root partition before reinstalling (or rather I let mkfs.ext4 -cc handle that), which showed no issues.

In addition, if I boot with the nomodeset option, I reach a CLI at least. On a hunch, I tried downgrading xf86-video-intel, no effect.

Does anyone have an idea, what I could try next?

David

yayachiken

Member

Registered: 2014-06-19

Posts: 2

Re: Thinkpad T61 boots into scrambled screen, persistent through reinstall

This appears to be related to the kernel upgrade to 3.15. Upstream bug here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80010

Switching to linux-lts helped me, and I am now able to start X.

pallegro

Member

Registered: 2013-02-12

Posts: 7

Re: Thinkpad T61 boots into scrambled screen, persistent through reinstall

I got bit by this, too. Thanks for pointing me to the bug report.  At least it's been bisected.
But like the reporter, I just need to suspend/resume after boot to get the screen up.
Looks like no kernel hackers have a T61 anymore