I have Fedora fc7 running great. I have an AMD 64 bit machine and run the x86_64 flavor of Fedora. I have an ATI X700 video card with the ATI proprietary driver installed and a digital 19" Viewsonic 922 monitor running at 1280x 1024.

OK, now the problem. I have tried without success to first upgrade and then install a fresh version of fc9 and then fc10. In both cases, the install would hang with video corruption during the install process. In addition the "live CD" versions do the same thing. If I install in text mode, I don't get the corruption, but the X server doesn't start. It gives a message that it attempted to start X multiple times before it stops.

I scoured the web and found many issues and workarounds with the ATI drivers, but nothing seems to work. I'm at a loss. Can anyone point me to a howto on this? Thanks.

First a comment. It is unwise to attempt an upgrade of more than one version. In other words, upgrading from Fedora 7 to 8 would be expected to work, but upgrading from Fedora 7 to 9 would not.

Now, some troubleshooting questions should help minimize the "back and forth"--I hope.

Has any hardware been changed since you were running Fedora 7?

Did you use the ATI proprietary driver previously or the open source one? If you used the proprietary one, how was it installed (from a repo like RPMFusion, from source, etc.)?

Is Fedora 10 running but just in text-only mode, or does it fail to boot at all or give you an unresponsive screen?

I'm actually currently running fc7 fine, so the failed upgrades to fc9 and fc10 do not involve new hardware. After I attempt to upgrade and fail, I restore my fc7 partitions with Clonezilla. Every so often I try again to upgrade.

I used the drivers from the ATI website and installed it according to ATI's installation notes. If that is a problem, I can attempt to get drivers from another source, install it on my fc7 and try the upgrade again to see if works better. Which sources do you recommend?

In text mode, I can get get to the terminal prompt using the rescue disk and changing to runlevel-3. I cannot start X, however. I get a message that it attempted to start it too many times and gave up.

I can try the upgrade again and get you the exact messages, if it will help. I tried Googling the messages I received and got no real answer. The one thing I did understand was that the upgrade uses the old Xorg.conf file and that causes problems. I tried deleting the old Xorg.conf and trying start X again, but it still didn't work.

Thanks,

Tom

Ok--I think I know where you are now. In your shoes, this is what I would do (or attempt).

Option 1. Do a regular install of F10 using separate partitions (/, /home, swap) from those you are currently using. I suspect that if you are re-using /home it is trying to utilize the ATI proprietary driver, which will not be compatible with the newer kernel.

Option 2. If you have a separate /home partition and want to keep using it, uninstall the proprietary ATI drivers. Next, install F10.

If my theory is correct, either option should allow you to boot into a correctly functioning GUI environment. It may not be optimized, but it should work. If for some reason it is not working, you should still get a command line from which you can still complete setting up the GUI environment (as root, of course).

Although it is rare, sometimes you may not even boot into the command line, but instead will just get a blinking cursor. In that case, boot directly into runlevel 3:
1.At the GRUB screen, use “a” to add to the boot arguments.
2.If you use them, remove any Plymouth arguments such as vga=0x376, since they won't work properly right now anyway.
3.Add “runlevel 3” to the end of the boot string.

To use proprietary drivers, I prefer setting up RPMFusion as a repository and using yum. For a guide regarding how that would be done, look here:
http://www.fedorafaq.org/

After setting up the repository, it may throw some errors, but that is just because it needs some keys. The faq covers how that is done. Once that is complete, the system should run fine.

Incidentally, the faq goes into some detail regarding installing the ati drivers, but running the following command as root in a terminal window does the trick for me.

yum install kmod-fglrx

It will add some extra packages to satisfy dependencies, but that should be all you need. Once that is done, it is probably best to reboot (shutdown -r now).

Thanks for all your help. I ended up wiping my old Fedora partitions, installing FC10 via text mode which, after installation dropped me into a text environment. I then followed the directions in:

http://djkaos.wordpress.com/2008/12/...piz-fedora-10/

and got the GUI to work.