[HD 4850] White screen of death - no escape

[Christian Convey]

I've got a card based on an ATI Radion HD 4850 chip. I burned today's live CD of Intrepid Ibex (386 Desktop), and used it to install the OS onto the HDD.

When GDM should come up, I get a white screen. Hitting ctrl-alt-F1 makes the screen go black, but no text comes up.

I do however hear the sound associated with GDM coming up.

[Christian Convey (christian-convey)]

I made a little progress. I downloaded ATI's proprietary driver (version 8.561), and installed it from single-user mode.

When I next booted, X didn't show me the white screen, but instead showed me a dialog box (grey on a black background) stating that there were problems with starting X, and it gave me several options. I think they included reconfiguring X, starting in low-graphics mode, and one other.

Anyway, I believe I started in low-graphics mode, just so I could log into my deskop. Then I went to the restricted drivers gui. It showed me a proprietary ATI driver being available, so I selected that. I was hoping that it would give me better luck than my manual installation of an ATI driver, mentioned at the beginning of this comment.

Sadly, when I rebooted, I got the same experience: the X dialog giving me a few options of how to deal with its inability to start.

[Lupine (thelupine)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in xorg.

For future reference you might be interested to know that a lot of applications have bug reporting functionality built in to them. This can be accessed via the Report a Problem option in the Help menu for the application with which you are having an issue. You can learn more about this feature at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

Also, I've been unable to reproduce your issue on Ubuntu 8.10. Can you reproduce this issue with an Ubuntu LIVE CD and report back if the problem still exists on Ubuntu 8.10 LIVE CD? I'm confused as to the exact steps you took. You stated in your second post that you manually installed ATI drivers, but made no mention of that in your first post. Can you post detailed step by step instructions of what you have done?

[Lupine (thelupine)]

One other thing, please attach your X server configuration file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) and X server log file (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) to the bug report as individual uncompressed file attachments using the "Attachment:" box below. Could you please also try to run without any /etc/X11/xorg.conf and let Xorg autodetect your display and video card? Please also attach the /var/log/Xorg.0.log from this attempt. Thanks in advance

[Christian Convey (christian-convey)]

Okay, I tried to reproduce the bug more carefully, so I can give a better report. Here are the details:

I downloaded the 9.04 (alpha3) AMD64 live desktop CD. I booted from it, using it as a live CD.

I ended up with a plain white screen. Hitting ctrl-alt-backspace had no visible effect.

When I tried to switch to a virtual terminal using ctrl-F1, ctrl-F2, etc., the screen when from all white to all black, and my monitor (the actual monitor) overlaid a message indicating that it's in 1920x1200 resolution. This is the only time I've ever seen my monitor bother to tell me that, and I don't know why it was doing it this time.

Hitting ctrl-F7 brings me back to the all-white screen.

I cannot give you and xorg.conf or xorg.0.log files, because this is a Live environment, which leaves no history on the hard drive and cannot be SSH'ed into.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

The usual technique is to boot into recovery/failsafe mode, set up the network, install stuff, make xorg.conf edits, and then continue to the normal boot or run startx.

However, you've got an r700 card, and the support for that is still quite new and fairly incomplete, so probably you should just wait on further testing until we have a new version of the driver with better support for your card. Meanwhile, you could try -radeonhd.

[Christian Convey (christian-convey)]

Hi Bryce,

Thanks for the tip. Is "-radeonhd" a boot parameter that I can supply
to the Live CD's kernel command line?

- Christian

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 2:09 AM, Bryce Harrington
<email address hidden> wrote:
> The usual technique is to boot into recovery/failsafe mode, set up the
> network, install stuff, make xorg.conf edits, and then continue to the
> normal boot or run startx.
>
> However, you've got an r700 card, and the support for that is still
> quite new and fairly incomplete, so probably you should just wait on
> further testing until we have a new version of the driver with better
> support for your card. Meanwhile, you could try -radeonhd.
>
> --
> [HD 4850] White screen of death - no escape
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/314897
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

radeonhd is an alternative video driver for newer ATI cards you can install and then specify in your xorg.conf.