nouveau hangs during boot of life system, prevents installation

[Jerry Preissler]

When trying to boot a life system from a usb key the system seems to boot normally but the screen turns completely white after about a minute and stays in this state. Pressing the up/down keys triggers a short burst of disk activity, otherwise the system seems to be idle.

It is possible to switch to the console with ctrl-alt-f1. At the end of /var/log/syslog I found many lines in the following form:

[drm] nouveau 0000:02:00.0: PFIFO_CACHE_ERROR - Ch 2/2 Mthd 0x0800 Data 0x00000000

The value after Mthd seems to change - I'll try to copy a sample tonight and attach it to the report.

The system is a Samsung R580 laptop, the graphics controller is reported to be a NVIDIA GT218 [GeForce 310M]

[Jerry Preissler (gerald-preissler)]

Sorry, forgot to mention: the version I'm trying to install is Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Beta 1.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1049497/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Jerry Preissler (gerald-preissler)]

The friendly bot prompted me to set a package to file the bug against. I'm giving it my best guess based on what I've seen in the syslog, but I'm by no means sure that is actually the right package.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Jerry Preissler, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xserver-xorg-video-nouveau REPLACE-WITH-BUG-NUMBER

Please note, given that the information from the prior release is already available, doing this on a release prior to the development one would not be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs