Xorg usually won't start on Compaq system with nVidia Corporation C51 [GeForce 6150 LE] and nVidia chipset

[Peter Belew]

Note: This also affects the upcoming 10.04.3 update - see #9.
Note: A problem with writing the MBR from the installer has resurfaced - see #12

I have installed the alpha-1 version of 'natty' 11.04 on a Compaq Presario SR1000 system (System Number EX325-AA-ABA) (originally sold as "Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005"), and updated the Ubuntu software up to this morning. Often it will not complete startup of Xorg - in this case, the screen is black except for a narrow white band at the top. The failure is shown in Xorg.0.log.

The display controller is: VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C51 [GeForce 6150 LE] (rev a2)

I installed the 32-bit Dec 2 alpha-1 version of 'natty', then updated this (see below for problems encountered).

Ubuntu version and kernel version
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=11.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=natty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu natty (development branch)"
Linux hp 2.6.37-12-generic #26-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jan 5 18:42:49 UTC 2011 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3800+
cpu MHz : 1000.000

Installation was a hassle. I tried daily builds from the 12th and 18th of January, and ran into various problems: First, I couldn't partition the disk, due to a strange MBR (apparently) from the MS-Windows software on the computer. Then, one of the installers simply hung at some point. Finally, I partitioned and formatted the disk with a Puppy Linux CD, then installed from the December 2 original Alpha-1 'natty' CD. I did re-format the partitions I had created with Puppy, to make sure there wasn't any incompatibility in file-system details. After this, I updated the system, at around the 18th or 19th of the month. I installed openssh-server so that I can access the system over my LAN, when Xorg won't start.

I haven't tried a 64-bit version yet, and don't really plan to do so.

I'm attaching a tar file with /proc/cpuinfo, /proc/meminfo, lsmod output, lspci output, Xorg.0.log, and Xorg.0.log.old

I installed the nvidia driver recommended when the Gnome session first started.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

A while after, I rebooted, and this time the Gnome display came up. I have attached the Xorg.0.log showing this.

Whether the X display starts is somewhat random. Sometimes I have to try several times, or I can't get it to start at all.

I would be happy to use the free driver on this system, since I don't need fancy graphics at all. How can I try that?

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

This system is exhibiting some disk drive errors, which may account for these problems. Sometimes the swap partition was failing to mount, also; but I added a swap file and commented-out the swap partition in /etc/fstab. That didn't fix the display problem though.

I'm doing a RAM check now (it has 1 GB of RAM, and a 512M swap file right now).

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

I plan to replace the hard drive, re-install Ubuntu 11.04 alpha, and retest

[kurt belgrave (trinikrono)]

Hello
Setting to incomplete until you retest with alpha2.
Cheers

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

I ended up buying a new hard drive and installing Fedora 14. I'll try a later alpha or beta of 11.04 though, as a live CD.

[kurt belgrave (trinikrono)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

See Bug #747069 for natty beta-1

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

This also fails with a 10.04.3 LTS RC build from 16 July 2011. After several minutes, with fairly frequent disk activity, disk activity ceases with a blank screen. The system does have 11.04 installed now.

(The 10.04.3 RC DVD does boot and seems to run well in some other Dell, gBox, and Shuttle systems I've tried this DVD on. There is a problem with a Averatec laptop, which I've reported in a separate bug - on the Averatec the screen size is detected wrong, and there are some video problems.)

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Today I tried the 20 Jul 2011 daily build of 10.04.3 LTS. Again, after selecting the "try Ubuntu" option at boot, the screen goes blank, the disk runs for a couple of minutes, and action stops. After some experimentation, I found I was able to ping the system from another host on my LAN at a dhcp-assigned IP address.

 I was able to issue a 'halt' command, and the live CD was ejected after several seconds. When I then closed the CD drawer and hit the Enter key, the system shut down as expected. After shutdown, there was no further response to pinging at that same IP address, which verifies the ping was indeed to that system.

So the OS is running, but there is no display.

I tried to blindly install openssh-server and create a user and password, but failed - I wasn't sure what mode the display was in.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

After some research, I was able to run the 10.04.3 live CD on this system as follows:

When booting the live CD, bring up the boot options by hitting ESC, select the language, then hit F6 to bring up some options. Select 'nomodeset' and continue. Eventually the system came up in text mode, as it was unable to determine a proper screen resolution.

I then copied in an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with very basic settings, including lists of allowable screen resolutions (this is in the attached tar file).

After that, I ran gdm, and the Gnome display appeared after a few minutes.

The tar file also includes /var/log/Xorg.0.log and Xorg.1.log, from after and before installing xorg.conf

The screen is a Samsung SyncMaster 570S tft 1024x768 panel. It does not provide proper screen resolution information to the system, unlike many other monitors in recent years.

This is a workaround, not a patch! Note again that 11.x live CDs do detect the screen resolution and bring up the display properly.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Status today: I was also able to get through booting the 11.04.3 64-bit version. So I tried to install it.

The problem with the boot sector mentioned in the original description surfaced again. After getting the 11.04.3 64-bit live cd to run, I tried installing the system. The install finished correctly, apparently, but the system would not boot.

Note that I had been running the 32-bit version of 11.04 previously.

I then tried installing a spin of 10.04.2 which has the Boot-Repair program in it. Running that program did not help the booting problem. I then re-partitioned the disk slightly differently with gparted, and re-installed. That didn't help.

I tried booting a couple of versions of Knoppix, looked at the partition table with gparted, and it looked fine. But the system still wouldn't boot from the hard disk.

Note that this is a new hard disk, installed since the original report, and 11.04 has been running on it.

I also tried running grub-install (according to ubuntu instructions for repairing Grub2); that didn't help either.

[komputes (komputes)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

The xorg logs shows that you are using the nvidia binary drivers. Is there any possibility that you can check if nouveau works correctly. You can boot into recovery mode and use jockey-text to enable/disable drivers. You can try removing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and try removing and reinstalling the driver from recovery mode.

Please also report apport information.

Please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:
$ apport-collect BUGNUMBER
or if offline, you can use this command and then move the .bug file.
$ apport-bug --save /tmp/report.bug nvidia-current # or -96 -173 -180 depending on which you have installed

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

I have just installed 64-bit 11.04 Natty on this system, and will not make any further changes until the next LTS release comes out, assuming that release is acceptable. This is a system I am relying on, so I really can't afford to experiment any more on it.

Note that I was unable to run the system after I finally installed 10.04.3 (as described above).

I might be able to try nouveau under 11.04, but I'm still restoring large amounts of data and a large web site to the computer. I'm not going to change the operating system.

Also, it's unlikely that I will continue with Ubuntu on this system in the future. I have been terribly unimpressed with 11.10, so far. It is totally going in the wrong direction.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

Also, I don't think I was able to get the system going as far as described in #13 - the system simply could not identify the monitor.

[komputes (komputes)]

Hi Peter,

Testing a releases with a LiveCD or a LiveUSB makes it simple to check if a problem is resolved without actually installing it on the machine. If you need persistence due to applications or drivers, I suggest having a look at my documentation on how to do a full install to USB:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/komputes/HowToUbuntuUSB

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

The machine won't boot from a USB stick. It does have a network boot option, but I don't know how to utilize that.

[komputes (komputes)]

PXE Booting is how you would go about network booting. As long as you can test LiveCD, you should be able to tell if the issue has been corrected using nouveau, which is included on the CD.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for nvidia-graphics-drivers (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]