Sounds much like my weekend rebuilding my desktop after ati/amd graphics driver upgrade apparently broke irrevocably my ability to boot with debian in the initrd.  Even single-user would crash prior to boot.  :\

Oddly I found a live-cd of mint, fedora, or ubuntu would work ok happily outputting across my 6 displays (with glx), but using the open-source radeon driver after install I'd install/reboot to get that black screen effect, seemingly crashing the kernel behind it.  Lots of reports of "black screen radeon", not much how to fix it that worked for me.  I later realized the intel graphics would take over, even though probing the radeon, and really just annoyed me as it works great in a live cd, but couldn't get anything else to work properly beyond. 

Probably similar what you're seeing if you have an integrated graphics and/or external video card.  Blacklisting the offender might work, but seems odd I don't have this issue once the proprietary amd blob is loaded.

Side note - after cursing lmde for a few days, and finding fedora install as broken as ubuntu/mint installers for raid/lvm setups, I tried a netinstall of ubuntu 14.04 which surprisingly did NOT suck like even their server iso's missing disk setup features.  Try that with a text install, and just "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" after.

Is it just me, or are all linux installers basketcases these days?  Seems not...

-mb


On 10/06/2014 12:15 AM, Mark Jarvis wrote:

For those of you old enough to remember the Li'l Abner comic strip, I'm beginning to feel like Joe Btfsplk, the hard luck character who had a small, dark, rain cloud perpetually hovering over his head.

I downloaded the latest 64 bit Ubuntu ISO and burned the image to disk. Booting from the DVD, it appeared to start, then went to a blank screen with a small icon at the bottom. After 5 or 6 minutes, I got tired of waiting and pushed the power button. Skipping some of the trials, it had apparently altered the boot order in setup to boot from the CD/DVD drive if there was something in it--not that I mind, I prefer that. anyway. If the DVD was in the drive it would boot from it and display some text options. One of the options said (approximately) run Ubuntu without installing.  I selected that option and pressed enter as instructed. Blank screen time.

I have an HP box with a Samsung Monitor (1920 x 1080).

First Knoppix, then Ubuntu. These used to be my sure fire, never fail distros.

FWIW, an old Ubuntu 9.10 (64 bit) CD loads & works fine in live CD mode.

I'd sure like to know what the problem is. Any suggestions gratefully accepted.


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