Fedora 12 Boot failure

basillica · 02-13-2010, 04:07 AM

Hi,
I am experiencing a strange situation with grub. That is, when I boot grub enters stage 1 boot but the screen goes blank with a blinking cursor and nothing else. However, I can boot into single user mode!

With the lack of feedback I'm at a loss with how to proceeed. Dmesg doesn't appear to throw much light on things so is there a way to get grub to start quealing and tell me what's up?

Note that this is following a reinstall. And that was as a result of the same problem triggered by a yum kernel update. Seeing as this seems like it could be a semi-recurring problem I've decided I need to get more of a handle on it.

Any help or advice will be warmly appreciated.

Regards,
Dave

bmxcess · 02-13-2010, 04:26 AM

What distro are you using? What version of grub - 1 or 2?

Does Ctrl - Alt F1 give you a login? Perhaps your new kernel is unable to load your video modules. Try
EDIT:

Code:

mv /etc/X11/Xorg.conf /etc/X11/Xorg.conf.bak
pkill X
startx

to regenerate your X config. If you can't see your login after Ctrl-Alt-F1 login as root blindly and carefully type previous commands.

HTH

syg00 · 02-13-2010, 04:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by basillica

Hi,
I am experiencing a strange situation with grub. That is, when I boot grub enters stage 1 boot but the screen goes blank with a blinking cursor and nothing else. However, I can boot into single user mode!

That doesn't make any sense - if you are stuck in grub stage1 (it can happen), how do you boot to single user ?.
Give us full details, and we may be able to help.

F12 uses grub classic by default.

basillica · 02-13-2010, 05:54 AM

Hi,
I said that the machine enters boot stage 1 but didn't say that it is stuck in boot stage 1. As I have no information whatsoever other than being able to boot into single user the only thing I can say categorically is that boot stage 1 is entered.

I take your point though and I should have made myself clearer. I'll follow the guidance given with the previous response and see what that does for me. I may also see what run levels I can get to from single user. That should tell me a lot.

Regards,
Dave

p.s. My video card is an ATI 4890.

syg00 · 02-13-2010, 06:10 AM

If you get to log in to single user, boot (i.e. grub) is not the problem - you are well past that.

smoker · 02-14-2010, 12:18 PM

You have video driver issues most likely.
Modify the kernel argument before booting and add nomodeset=1 (or just nomodeset)to the end.
That should let it finish booting at least.

see more at :
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common...phics_adapters