Help troubleshoot (suspected) video card failure

Trilby · 2012-03-25 17:22:24

Recently my intel macbook (single boot archlinux) stopped booting. I'd land at a blank screen with two small dash-like lines at the top.

It seemed to happen at udev events processing when video the video mode would be set (late KMS I believe).

I editted the grub line to add "nomodeset" and I am able to successfully boot into a console.

When I try to start x however (with xinit or startx) I get an error that no screen was detected and I am dropped back to the console (after I break with Ctl-C as it seems to hang at that error).

I installed xf86-video-fbdev and had the same results, then I tried xf86-video-vesa and it is 'working' though not particularly pretty.

I'm a bit out of my depth with this one. Can anyone offer troubleshooting steps to determine whether my video card has failed? Specifically, would vesa be expected to work in the absence of a (functioning) video card?

I have xf86-video-intel installed which is what is recomended for the card.

lspci | grep VGA wrote:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 03)

Please let me know what other info or tests would be relevant. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Sadly this must be a hardware issue as a live CD from another distro leads to the same blank screen problem when it sets the video mode. I'm not sure why VESA still works though - I'm a complete noob when it comes to drivers and hardware, if anyone can shed light on this it'd be appreciated.

And if, by any chance, someone has any miracle to revive this machine, it'd be appreciated, though I suspect I am S.O.L.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-03-25 18:06:17)

amenditman · 2012-03-25 20:44:39

Does the live CD boot to a Vesa desktop? If so, I would guess that your X server configuration has gotten hosed.

If a Live CD will get a VESA desktop, the graphics adapter is probably working. Start looking for software/configuration problems. That means X.

Trilby · 2012-03-25 22:34:44

Thanks, I didn't try the live CD with vesa, but x works with arch in vesa. I'll look into my x configs tomorrow as that computer is at the office (one of the offices anyway). I shouldn't have anything custom in my xorg configs, so perhaps I could just ditch them all and try again.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-03-25 17:22:24

Help troubleshoot (suspected) video card failure

#2 2012-03-25 20:44:39

Re: Help troubleshoot (suspected) video card failure

#3 2012-03-25 22:34:44

Re: Help troubleshoot (suspected) video card failure

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