Nvivida card not found after upgrade

[leegold]

Hi,

I'm going from (my brain’s) memory since I can't really boot LL 1.06 now. I got a new monitor, a Neovo F-419. Dual booting XP and XP works OK with new monitor. When I booted LL the resolution was very low (icons were huge) and it worked but so big it was unusable. I have nvivida card so went into nvivida settings to increase resolutions but got a message within nvivida settings that it could not do that and said I should upgrade driver. I went into Synaptic and saw i was using driver 173 ver. I saw nvidia current as 304 and checked/installed that.  LL booted to black/blank screen, I did see a message at some point while booting that nvidia video adapter was "not found".

I then rebooted into recovery mode with most recent I have kernel: 3.2.0. 60 generic-pae . I then tried "Drop to root shell" to maybe reinstall or try another nvidia driver, or something to fix(?). But when I did that it says "Give root password for Maintenance (or type Control-D to Continue):". Password or anything I've tried does not work here, cntrl-D just takes me back to recovery menu.

I'm at a dead end. What can I do?

Thanks.

[Valtam]

What connection to your monitor are you using, hdmi, vga, dvi etc?

[leegold]

What connection to your monitor are you using, hdmi, vga, dvi etc?

the monitor has all those sockets but i use the vga.

the error message is like - nvidia interface not found.

The pc has an onboard video and sometimes that can confuse Linux maybe? But it was working fine till i tried to upgrade the driver via  apt-get install

i have the bios set to not use the onboard card which is terrible.

dual boot XP works OK as I mentioned.

A live CD disk LL 1.08 boot with "start LL in safe graphics mode"  boots to a usable good looking desktop. but not going F7 and just doing default boot option  then the live disk boots to as black/blank screen just like the installed on hard drive LL 1.06.

I've tried reinstalling the driver. Maybe unadvisedly I saw a web page showing "Edge" repository with latest and greatest drivers and more...kernel too and I did that whole thing - no luck though.

Last resort I will wipe and reinstall LL completely if nothing fixes, but not until I try any recommendations first.

Thank you for time.

[Valtam]

What video card do you have?

[leegold]

What video card do you have?

onboard is Intel 82845G.  But the BIOS gives a choice of "Auto" or "onboard".  It is set to "Auto" else this Intel chip will be used (and I do not like the intel chip). With "Auto" if there's another graphics adaptor in a PCI slot the PCI graphic card should be used.

In a PCI slot is Nvidia GeForce FX 5200. This is what I want to use and it seems LL looks but isn't finding it(?)

[Valtam]

Since the Intel will never be used I would disable it in the Bios as a first step.

Your card is a 'legacy' card, not very well supported but may work under the 173 driver.
You've really done so much to try and get that card working, you're now at a stage where there are a mixture of attempts to get it working and its all kinds of messed up. A 15 minute reinstall is a better use of your time. Then choose the 173 drivers if they are listed in Install Drivers. If they don't work its time for a card upgrade, and not worth the hassle of mucking around with the old one, its only going to cause frustration.

[leegold]

Since the Intel will never be used I would disable it in the Bios as a first step.

Your card is a 'legacy' card, not very well supported but may work under the 173 driver.
You've really done so much to try and get that card working, you're now at a stage where there are a mixture of attempts to get it working and its all kinds of messed up. A 15 minute reinstall is a better use of your time. Then choose the 173 drivers if they are listed in Install Drivers. If they don't work its time for a card upgrade, and not worth the hassle of mucking around with the old one, its only going to cause frustration.

Reinstalled the OS and I'm right back where i started from. Using 173 and resolution is so low (640x480) that it's unusable, no options to change w/nviida-settings. Tried generating an xorg.config file and playiing with that only made things worse...

I tried 304 driver worked but exactly the same problem, too low a resolution - this is a big LCD monitor with high resolution capabilities.

I can wipe the xorg config files, go back to 173 or even reinstall the LL again. Whatever.

But, what is the fix???

[gold_finger]

Searches reveal many people having problems with that card.  Found this post with a solution:  http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=108418.  No idea whether this will work or not, but can't hurt to try at this point.

First -- Make sure that the 173 driver is the one you are using.  Then continue below.

Looked up specs on your machine and made a couple of changes to the xorg.conf file from that post.  Do the following to either replace your current xorg.conf (if it exists), or to create one (if it doesn't).

Open a terminal and enter:

Code:

gksudo leafpad /etc/X11/xorg.conf

*  If it contains anything, delete it all.

*  Copy/Paste the following in its entirety into the text editor.

Code:

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# Note that some configuration settings that could be done previously
# in this file, now are automatically configured by the server and settings
# here are ignored.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
#   sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "Device"
   Identifier   "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
   Identifier   "Configured Monitor"
   VendorName   "Neovo"
   ModelName   "F-419"
   HorizSync   24 - 80
   VertRefresh   56 - 75
   Option      "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
   Identifier   "Default Screen"
   Monitor      "Configured Monitor"
   Device      "Configured Video Device"
   Option      "metamodes" "1280x1024 +0+0"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
   Option   "DontZap"   "False"
EndSection

*  Save the file; close leafpad; close terminal.

*  Cross your fingers and reboot computer to see if it worked.


P.s.  If this did end up working, make sure you save these instructions somewhere handy.  If X server gets updated, you will likely have to repeat the procedure to get it working again.  Or, just make a duplicate of the file under a different name.  For example:

Code:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.neovo

If time comes that you need it, just do:

Code:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.neovo /etc/X11/xorg.conf

[leegold]

snip...

First -- Make sure that the 173 driver is the one you are using.  Then continue below.

Looked up specs on your machine and made a couple of changes to the xorg.conf file from that post.  Do the following to either replace your current xorg.conf (if it exists), or to create one (if it doesn't).

...snip

Yes! I needed to edit xorg.conf, so you were steering me on the right track, thanks.

I did sudo nvidia-xconfig which I think makes an xorg.conf file or "refreshes" it...then when I rebooted  I got a stern message that the resolution and refresh rate were out of range and the message suggested "1280x1024" and 60hz. I edited xorg.conf appropriately and to my slight disbelief a hi-res usable desktop now appears and seems to work. I post yet another xorg.conf  below:

Code:

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig:  version 1.0  ([email protected])  Wed Nov 27 15:15:17 PST 2013

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0"
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 80.0
    VertRefresh     60.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes     "1280x1024"  "1024x768"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

[gold_finger]

Good Job!!!  Glad to see you got it settled.

Might be a good idea to make a backup copy saved to same directory just in case some update along the line messes it up.

Code:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.goodcopy

If the need arises to restore it.

Code:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.goodcopy /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Once you have the backup made, you may want to try inserting the specs that I found on your monitor in place of the generic ones "suggested" to see if they offer slight improvement.  Just replace things below in blue -- not whole file.

Your Current One Says:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier    "Monitor0"
    VendorName    "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    HorizSync      30.0 - 80.0
    VertRefresh    60.0
    Option        "DPMS"
EndSection


Mine from Monitor Specs:

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier  "Configured Monitor"
  VendorName  "Neovo"
  ModelName  "F-419"
  HorizSync  24 - 80
  VertRefresh  56 - 75
  Option      "DPMS"
EndSection


If those work and you want to keep those settings, copy them to the backup file using same command as above.  (It will overwrite the first xorg.conf.goodcopy you made with the new settings.)