New system bricked after X install please help....

braz2kuk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 89

Hi All,

Firstly a bit of background i have a Macbook Pro (5,3) with OS X installed i repartitioned my drive as below using gparted:

/dev/sda1 EFI boot partition (boot flag true) FAT32
/dev/sda2 MAC OS X partition HFS
/dev/sda3 /boot partition ext2
/dev/sda4 / partition ext4
/dev/sda5 swap partition

I then successfully installed the lastest gentoo base system x86_64 and built my own kernel using gentoo-sources-3.10.25, I used rEFInd to boot my system and restarted after install to ensure everything worked and it did very happy :-)

My system profile is set as /13.0/gnome NOT /13.0/gnome/systemd i wanted to get a working system without systemd first and possibly upgrade in the future.

After i had installed and rebooted i updated my make.conf to include 'udev', 'X', 'gnome' and 'gtk' i also set the xorg driver to 'nvidia' in this .conf and also set my INPUT_DEVICES as 'udev' and 'synaptics'

I then proceeded to emerge 'xorg-server' it told me it was going to emerge a whole host of packages along with xorg-server and the nvidia-drivers i thought great and let it get with it's thing. After a successful install i ran env-update && source /etc/profile and rebooted.

To my horror on reboot i select Gentoo from within rEFInd and i see the system start to boot i get the white text on the screen and the last thing i see before i get a black screen is 'udev events'? my system continues to boot however with a black screen i cannot get rid of! I can blindly log into the system and reboot it however it look like i now need to go through the pains of a reinstall as i have bricked it.

Hopefully somebody on here can help with what i need to do to fix this.

Thanks in advance guys.

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 12:23 pm Post subject:

Do you have the "xdm" service turned on?

If so, you should boot from a livecd, mount -obind /proc, /sys and /dev just like when installing. Do the chroot step, and from there remove that service (you really shouldn't enable it until you are confident that X works at all).

braz2kuk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 89

Thanks for the response i have removed xdm from the startup however on reboot cannot get into a command line either.

In my kernel i have not included frame buffer support nor have included any nvidia or noveu drivers, in terms of KMS i may have enabled this what options would be selected if i have? I equipped my kernel with systemd options for the future for when i switch to systemd i take it i should not have done this?

Thanks in advance

ulenrich · Veteran Joined: 10 Oct 2010 Posts: 1480

Booting in efi mode my MacMini with propr. nvidia-drivers I ever have had a blacked console and just X
Using nouveau results in a crash with cold boot but proper warm reboots the system.
I am pretty desperate like you

(this hasn't todo with systemd or openrc,
I tried also to reinstall the system,
my Debian~unstable-siduction is able to boot,
but using that kernel on Gentoo has same effects,
my workaround is hybrid mbr bios compatible boot)

ulenrich · Veteran Joined: 10 Oct 2010 Posts: 1480