Hi guys,
I come back to you after some time away in a happy place where tech support is never needed, once again humbly requesting your expertise.
When my laptop hinge busted, I salvaged the HDD and decided to mount it in my next desktop build and use it until I bought another HDD to sell it with. This drive was partitioned with a dual boot of Win7pro64 and Backtrack 5r1 64, both were pretty well maintained, no foreseeable issues with swapping the drive, right?
Well, we seem to be having some technical difficulty, on both fronts. As this is linuxquestions, Ill restrict this to my linux issues, but for any bilingual folks out there that are interested, I'm posting the other half of the dilemma on sevenforums, sparing them the linux part of it lol. Ill add a link to it once its up.
Okay so here is the hardware, as I believe the video card/driver is the key element here.
Asus M5A97 mobo, amd970/sb950 chipset, is rated to support all components
AMD FX-8120 CPU Black Edition
16 GB G-Skill Sniper pc3-12800 ram
XFX nVidia GeForce 6800GT 256MB GDDR3 (I can hear your snickering
)
Raidmax 630w PSU
Samsung Supermulti Optical
WD Scorpio Black Laptop SATA HDD
Everything listed is brand new, purchased online, save for the HDD of course. The video card was purchased used at the local computer shop, last-minute.
So just let me explain the nvidia card real fast
I planned this build assuming my old HD3870 would work just fine, but it went out on me almost right away. I had it hookup up to a coby tv with a 1366x768 resolution, which is what the nvidia card is powering now as well, via DVI-I output to a DVI to HDMI adapter, then through an HDMI-HDMI cable to the tv, same as the HD3870 was (in case any of that proves relevant). My original intention was to leave this setup open for crossfire if I found another 3800 series. I should note that I did not ever get so far with the HD 3870 to compare its results with Backtrack to the nVidia's. The furthest I'd gotten when the ATi card went out on me was exploring the BIOS.
When I boot up, I get a POST beep, I go into the BIOS, everything is looking tip top. I hit boot menu, I select the HDD, everythings still going fine. Grub comes up okay, I can make my selection. After choosing, I see the whirling text and it all springs to life, nothing looks amiss. Yet. The text color is juuuuust slightly off. Impercievable at first, but as I've been at this for some time, I can see it now. As soon as the login pops up with the DE select and all that, it is very percievable from here on out***. The color depth looks like it's set really low, (can barely read text on the screen) and the colors are way off. This persists throughout. All the window effects and transitions are taking place, they just look very interesting between the depth and the hue, something like a collidoscope at times.
***I would like to point out something interesting I saw at the top of the screen at this point. I only saw it once, and it went away too quickly to read it all, but I distincly saw "GPU lockup" and "switching to software". I was thinking could be a driver issue, with it defaulting to the "nouveau" driver, and that for some reason failing with this setup.
kernel is 2.6.39.4
Code:
lsmod | grep nouveau:
nouveau 702984 2
ttm 65122 1 nouveau
drm kms helper 32921 1 nouveau
drm 211510 4 sill64,nouveau,ttm,drm kms helper
i2c algo bit 5628 1 nouveau
video 12530 1 nouveau
Code:
lspci | grep nVidia:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV45 [GeForce 6800GTO] (rev a2)
Not sure why it says VGA compatible controller, other than the fact that it should be, my card only has S-video and dual DVI-I, though I would think if it were trying to force DVI-A, I would get next to nothing for a picture as there is no analog-to-digital conversion taking place, so am I safe in assuming that can be ruled out?
I was trying to remember how Id configured the video on my laptop originally, and It seemed like there was some sort of dialogue that took me through various settings and configs to see what worked best. I thought that I'd found it when booting into recovery mode, but many of the options literally do nothing. Let me elaborate.
I get the menu with the options resume, clean, dpkg, failsafeX, grub, netroot, and root. I believe failsafeX is what I'm looking for, but that gets me to a nasty screen, I'll attach pics. Says "Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode", followed by "The following error was encountered. You may need to update your configuration to solve this." The rest of the screen is filled with this:
Code:
(EE) [drm] failed to open device
(EE) VESA: Kernel modesetting driver in use, refusing to load.
(EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOPUTCMAP: Invalid argument
(EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOPUTCMAP: Invalid argument
(EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOPUTCMAP: Invalid argument
And repeats this last line to the bottom of the screen. I have seen that error reapeated in dmesg while trying to figure this out myself.
I hit tab then enter to get past it. Then my options are: Run ubuntu in low-graphics for 1 session, reconfigure graphics, troubleshoot error, exit to console, restart x.
Under troubleshoot I can only review the xserver logfile, which I cant make much sense of, or review startup errors, which is empty. Edit conf file doesnt work. I hit archive confs and logs and it says they were saved.
Going back to select 'reconfigure graphics', I have three options: use default (generic) config, create new config for this hardware, and use backed-up config. Choosing any of them and hitting okay makes the screen blink, and re-selects the first option to use defaults. I hit cancel. I select 'run in low-graphics mode once', and I am back at the beginning of the recovery mode options. I hit resume to continue normal boot, but there is no difference in the display.
I have tried using my live USB copy of Backtrack 5r1 64, and it says it cannot find a live file system in the image. How odd, since I am not only using my USB Backtrack now, but I use it quite frequently to bypass the HDD and use my own OS when on other's machines, be it laptops or desktops, on all different kinds of hardware, and I have never had an issue like this. I have gotten resolutions that did not fill he screen, but the picture was always accurate and proportionate, and functionality/compatibility in every other aspect has been most impressive.
I know that these do not seem inter-related, but I am convinced there is a universal culprit here. I know I should update all drivers, but I have really never had to do ANYthing with drivers in linux, and don't want to mess with it with anything less than a Guru walking me through it. I do not have the nVidia disc, nor do I know where to obtain these linux drivers from or how to know which driver goes to which card/chipset/model/kernel, its really not my forte. Usually I'm a little more adventurous than this, but with all 3 of my OS's taking a dump at once, I don't want to dig myself any deeper of a hole. Any advice, suggestions, ideas, or instructions would be much appreciated.
Pic#1: My Pretty BIOS
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l2...mface/bios.jpg
Pic#2: My GRUB Options
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l2...mface/grub.jpg
Pic#3: My Awful Splash Screen
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l2...ace/splash.jpg
Pic#4: My Awful Loading Screen
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l2...ce/loading.jpg
Pic#5: My Sorta-OK Inverted DE
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l253/jermface/de.jpg
Pic#6: The Worst - My Poor Firefox!
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l2...ce/firefox.jpg
Pic#7: Recovery Low-Graphics Error
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l2...face/logfx.jpg
I tried to be as detailed as I can be, but understand that my technical knowledge is limited to what I've personally had to overcome, which has resulted in the most random and uncorrelated array of information lol so please bear with me if I didn't check something I should've or if I've missed something rather obvious.
TIA
