partial boot then black screen

[sdidier]

after working fine for more than a week I was able to connect on a broadband connection did an emerge sync and now I cannot boot into my Gentoo system! It will start booting do a flicker and then black screen.

I haven't booted from the cd to do a rescue and I suspect that it is related to my xorg.cong file. But I am not sure and would like maybe a pointer or two before I start anything!

Thanks

[JoseJX]

Well, an emerge sync does not change any files for booting, it only updates the portage tree. Can you explain the boot-> flicker thing? Does is show the boot logo? Does it show all of the init scripts starting, then flicker? Did you upgrade your kernel before the update? Did you change your Xorg.conf file?

[sdidier]

I did not update or change my kernel or the xorg file at boot part of the init script shows maybe 20-30 lines then a flicker and fade of the next 15 or so lines it moves too fast to read but the ultimate end is a black screen.

I'll try to catch the line at which it changes and let you know.

[sdidier]

I was finally able to see the message displayed in the brief init script. The last line of maybe 20 is:
closeppc=exit

Any thoughts?

[ineappleP]

I think I'm experiencing the same (or similar) problem. I've got a 12" iBook G4 @ 1 GHz with a Radeon 9200 video card. The machine seeems to boot successfully about 1 in 3 times. The other 2 out of 3 boots, it gives the same black screen that you are talking about.

I first tried installing with 2004.1, but the screen was so flickery in the install that I never got very far. Then I tried 2004.2 which worked a whole lot better, and I was able to successfully complete the install.

So my guess is that the problem is related somehow to the frambuffer or agpgart with this particular video card. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future kernel.

Anyone got any better ideas?

[Tesseract]

I guess you could try passing "video=ofonly" to the kernel. Also you could boot into runlevel 3 to stop X from loading, and you could then at least try to fix things from the command line. (Unless of course the video dies before X starts, in which case you definitely have kernel problems.)

[sdidier]

This happens before X starts so I guess it must be a kernel problem. On a side note I wasn't able to use Xfree and used Xorg instead but I had to manually copy the values over from posts on this forum to get X running initially. Could it be that the xorg kernel config screwed things?

[sdidier]

I just occured to me that a bit more info might help Prior to the last crash and the subsequent inability to boot into an X server, I was running KDE at first things were fine but then whenever I had more than 2 apps running the hard drive light would go into overdrive, the screen would eventually be redrawn several times, the system would ultimately lock up with the back of my TiBook hot enough to fry eggs on. I would then have to do a hard shut down.
So maybe I'll have to recompile the kernel? Should I go through the system and purge all references and files to X11? Ideas?
Thanks

[SeJo]

The xorg shouldn't be a problem depending on what version you use.
In my eyes you seem to have a kernel problem, you might consider recompiling your kernel and use or radeonfb or no fb.

greetings

[sdidier]

Thanks all, I am going to take a break from Gentoo, play with YDL, get caught up on all the things I've neglected in this odessey and revisit Gentoo when the "official" 2004.2 release is listed!