Catalyst 9.3 (fglrx 8.593) boots to black screen.

[quequotion]

I'm elevating Sudheer's report to a bug because I'm having the same problem. My setup is a little different, but the error is the same. I installed Jaunty and downgraded for the legacy ATI driver. This works well for fglrx 8.543, which is in the intrepid repos, but attempting to boot with 8.593 results in a black screen.

I have seen elsewhere that a similar error was avoided by downgrading libdrm2 to version 2.3.1, which I did in advance of installing fglrx 8.593 (installed 2.3.1-0ubuntu1 from the intrepid repos). It could still have something to do with libdrm2, but I don't have any idea.

In my case the system boots all the way up to where gdm and X should load, but the screen flashes on and off a few times (black screen when on) then finally freezes while on at a black screen. I also have a small line of red and blue "fuzz" near the top of the screen which looks similar to graphical errors I get with fgrlx 8.543 if something glitches.

This error comes out on a fairly clean install (base system and fglrx installed (in chroot) via the livecd, then reboot).
Removing fglrx from xorg.conf does not make the system bootable and the default fglrx also results in failure. I tried "aticonfig --acpi-services=off" as suggested here: http://www.linlap.com/wiki/hp+elitebook+8530p and that causes the screen not to flash and the fuzz not to appear, but I'm still getting a black screen at boot.

Finally, I've removed fglrx completely so as to boot my system, but I'd like to get to the bottom of this.

Why doesn't fglrx 8.593 want to boot?

I have xserver-xorg-core 1.5.2, kernel 2.6.28-17-generic, libdrm2 2.3.1 as well as a ton of other downgraded packages to match those.

Sudheer's original question:
>Hi,
>
> I have Asus M2A-VM HDMI mother board containing ATI Radeon X1250 display card. I use KDE ubuntu 8.04 version. Very >recently I installed the new driver from the below mentioned link
>
>http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.7&lang=English&rev=9.2&>ostype=Linux%20x86_64
>
>After installation everything seemed to work. But after the reboot, i'm not getting any display. Its fully blank. I'm not able to >work on my system. Please advice
>
>
>Regards,
>Sudheer

[quequotion (quequotion)]

Problem solved.

Found this solution for OpenSuSe, but it probably works with any system that loads from grub and uses fglrx 8.539

http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/428160-11-2-fixes-xpress-200-other-legacy-cards.html

The "black screen of death" can be fixed by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and adding "vga=0xf06" and the end of your "kernel" line. This can also be entered during boot, if you know/have no other way to access the file, by editing the grub menu at boot (esc @ grub, select installation, e, select kernel, e, type at the end) but it's temporary of course.

[quequotion (quequotion)]

Nevermind, it seems 0xf06 inexplicably stops working after a while (see discussion on the second page of the forum link i posted before)....

I have yet to try the final vga mode suggested (0x317) and am presently seeking advice in the forum.

Also, while I am out of ideas, I'll keep myself assigned anyway...