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Gary van der Merwe
Asked: 2011-03-25 10:57:27 +0800 CST

After upgrade, get blank purple screen. No gdm and can't switch to tty [duplicate]

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I upgraded to 11.04 using update-manager -d. When I try to boot, I just get a purple blank screen, with no ubuntu logo/dots showing. It never gets to the gdm login screen (I left it for 20min) and I can't get to a tty by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. I don't see a grub menu/count down screen either.

My computer is a Dell Vostro 1500 with a Nvidia Geforce. I had the proprietary nvidia driver installed before upgrading.

I've boot with a live cd, from where I am writing this, and I can mount the disk, but I don't know where to start looking for the issue.

11.04

4 Answers

  1. What I did from the command line is to find the packages for nvidia (dpkg -l | grep nvidia) and then apt-get remove nvidia-173 (or whatever package you get from the previous command).

    The problem is that you will still have the nvidia modues listed in xorg.conf. So, I also mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup and rebooted.

    I landed in a graphical mode as usual, without the nvidia GL stuff, but then there are graphical tools to set it up.

    At this state, it's safe to delete the xorg.conf backup you just created.

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  2. I tried booting again, and was able to get into the grub menu. Not sure why I could not get to the menu before. Maybe I just was not pressing the down arrow soon enough. (The grub menu is now also purple.)

    I can boot with an old kernel 2.6.35-28-generic, but not with the new kernel 2.6.38.7. This corresponds with the note about nvidia drivers it the release notes.

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  3. I had this issue too and I've solved it installing the appropriate version of nvidia drivers (for me 173.xx)

    Simply log in with a ubuntu classic (no effects) session, go to administration -> proprietary driver and you'll find you have a recommended version of nvidia drivers installed and another one. Just activate the other one and reboot.

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  4. You can try the Noveau drivers for NVIDIA or try this:

    sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

    Look for the quiet nosplash section and add this next to it: nohz=off

    Then:

    sudo update-grub

    I had a similar problem with an ATI/AMD card and didn't want to use the pci=noacpi since it disables key features.

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