I am a frustrated newbie. My newly installed system was working great after fixing some video card problems. Then I downloaded updates and installed them. Since then I have not been able to boot into Fedora 16. The GRub2 loader goes through its process and then I get a black screen. I can boot into the recovery console and wonder if editing the xorg.conf will help. But I do not know how to do that. Please help! Thanks and regards.

Try pressing <Ctrl>F1 or <CTRL>+<ALT>F1 when booted.
By default your machine will boot into graphical mode and since something is screwed up with your vide drivers, you end up with a black screen.
By switching to a terminal mode (see above; F1 to F4 will provide text mode terminals), you should be able to salvage your system form the command line.

Which video driver did you install? Maybe the kernel was updated and you simply have to re-install the video driver in order to build the kernel module against the new kernel version. Please, provide as many details as you can.

Thanks for responding. Ctr F1 or Ctr Alt F1 does not do a thing. The driver I installed was the amd-driver-installer-12-2-x86.x86_64. It worked perfect. I have a HD 6480G radeon graphics card. When I boot into a rescue shell, and go to where the install file is, I run it with the sh command. It keeps giving me an error, like I am running an x86 machine and doesn't do anything, then ends up with cleaning up. I actually installed the Fedora16 x686 originally.

At first you can try to uninstall the driver:
or
Second, you have to clarify which kernel you are actually running. Please post the output of:
and
In any case, if you successfully remove the driver, you can try to install it again. If the error is the same we have to deeply investigate what the x86 vs x86_64 problem is.

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Thanks, colucix. Nothing works yet. I was able to boot with level 3, and root.
It didn't let me uninstall. There is an error message.
uname -a gave the following response:
Linux bernie-fedora16 3.2.9-2.fc16.i686 #1 SMP Mon Mar 5 21:12:36 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

rpm -qa kernel* gave this: kernel-3.1.0-7.fc16.i686
kernel-3.2.9-2.fc16.i686

Using the old kernel also gives me a black screen.
If I do a Xorg -configure, I get a long error message; part of it says 'fatal error, caught signal 11'.

If I do aticonfig --initial, it says it found fglrx primary device section using /etc/X11/xorg.conf and it saved a backup.
Nothing changes after that. I give the command Xorg, and black screen.

Is there a way to edit the xorg.conf file? With what command?

I have wasted so much time looking up forums and no results yet.

Am trying to figure out how to handle my boot menu for Fedora 16. It's just some green blur which I can't really see. I have an HP laptop. When I look from a angle, I can detect 4 little squares of some sort, at the top of the screen, placed horizontally next to each other. The letters are tiny, tiny so that I can't read them. Is there a way to change the grub2 configuration to change this so that the resolution is legible? Right now I can't do anything with it. It just boots straight into my default OS. Thanks.

And what might that be? A Linux distro, some windows system? other?

If you have a Linux Live CD you can boot to and mount whichever partition you have the Fedora system files on and you are using Grub2 on your Fedora (Fedora 16 offers both) and if you can open a Terminal and then edit the /etc/default/grub file and remove the hash mark (#) from this line:
it might work. A lot of ifs, but you didn't give much detail.

Thanks, Yancek. I'll try that and post back. My default OS is Windows 7. I dual-boot with it. I also have a bootloader menu on my MBR, which is text-based and it can be read. So there I can make a choice. Once I am in Fedora, I have no graphics problem, just with the menu GRUB2 provides.

Merged your two threads on the same topic; please don't double-post/start
new threads like this.

I am trying to understand my bootloaders. I dual-boot Windows 7 and Fedora 16. When I first start my laptop, I get a graphical bootmenu which I cannot read. It's greenish and has tiny letters, with 4 horizontally placed menus. That times out. Then I get the Winloader, a text menu, white on dark gray. There I can choose between Windows and Fedora. If I choose Fedora, I get a third boot text menu, with white on black, highlighted cyan blue. It lists 3 different kernels and also Windows, including Windows Recovery. I am using EasyBCD.
My question is: How can I get rid of the first screen which I can't see? How can I edit the third one, to change colors and background? When I look at etc/default/grub.cfg or grub.d I do not see the colors for menuitems. Thanks in advance for your help.

And another merge ... please keep your discussion(s) in one place; some of the "prior knowledge"
of your set-up is already in the pre-existing thread - no point in tying peoples time up by
kicking a new one.

It sounds to me like you installed a new video driver, then updated the kernel. This broke your video driver, since it had compiled itself for your previous kernel, which left you with CLI only. As was suggested earlier, you can get into the CLI terminal with the TTYs, however the new Fedoras use Ctrl+Alt+F1 for X nowadays, so you need to use Ctrl+Alt+F[2-7] to get into the CLI.

What I normally do in these situations is boot the new kernel, switch to CLI using Ctrl+Alt+F2, re-install the video driver, then reboot. I'm very familiar with Fedora (16 included), however I usually stick to nvidia cards instead of ati, so I'm not 100% on the ati driver install process.

Thank you, suicidaleggroll and Tinkster. We differ as far as this being merged. My system works perfect by itself. It's just the booting process. But since then I got rid of the first invisible boot screen. Also, by editing grub.d/41_custom, I have been able to change the colors of the menu items and background. BTW, Ctrl-Alt-F(x) has never worked for me.