Blank / Black screens on boot half the time [R9 280X]

[Justin Stressman]

I have 3 monitors hooked up.

Roughly every other time I reboot, I get past my grub screen and then the left and right side monitors are on and "awake" but blank, and the center screen never comes out of sleep mode.

The boot never progresses past this point and you can't switch to another virtual console or anything. It's just apparently frozen there.

If I hit the reset button on the case, it usually boots to the login screen just fine the next time around.

From Details:
Memory: 11.7 GiB
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 CPU 965 @ 3.20GHz × 8
Graphics: Gallium 0.4 on AMD TAHITI
OS type: 64-bit
System up to date

From lspci -vv:
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Tahiti XT [Radeon HD 7970/8970 OEM / R9 280X] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
 Subsystem: PC Partner Limited / Sapphire Technology Device 3000
 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx+
 Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
 Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 256 bytes
 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 80
 Region 0: Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
 Region 2: Memory at fba80000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
 Region 4: I/O ports at b000 [size=256]
 Expansion ROM at fbac0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
 Capabilities: <access denied>
 Kernel driver in use: radeon

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Which version of Ubuntu are you using? Can you please paste the output of uname -srm?

[Justin Stressman (jstressman)]

Linux 3.13.0-32-generic x86_64