after video driver update...black screen on boot

My Machine: Lenovo T400 laptop, 9.04 ubuntu
My problem: while working on my laptop the system Offered an update to my ATI video card............so being the nube that I am I said go ahead and install it............yep that f'd it up. it ran for a while then froze up to the point I had to hard boot the machine. on restart the desktop splash/load screen displays but nothing else afterwards. I can get into restore mode and even terminal but can't seem to find anything to help out........there is an autofix video option but that did not work either.

I spent a week loading and configuring this thing and do not want to start back from scratch...........I have too much stuff to lose on a new install. funny thing is that I just had set the system to do a complete backup of the ubuntu instance for tonight so I would have some way to restore this if something happened...........well it happend before the backup ran tonight........go figure.

help me out if you can......is there a way to reload the default system without loosing my files and such? I would just have to load vmware back on and some other programs but I a okay with that.

A lot of people have been having the same problem. You need to uninstall the proprietary driver and use the open source one instead.

Code:

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sudo apt-get remove fglrx

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Thanks for the reply..........what does this script do...........reload the default video driver? or uninstall the current driver........or both? complete nubie on Terminal lingo.

no good..........I ran the script in the recovery terminal with network

sudo apt-get remove fglrx

but got the repoly that package fglrx did not exist.......so back to square one. anybody else want to chime in? or have came across a thread that might help.

Don't think that command is correct ...

Look in the link below, in the section about removing the proprietary driver, for the proper commands:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

sorry, don't mean to hijack the thread, but when I try to do any of that I get a notice saying everything on my drive is read only. I accessed the prompt through the recovery mode normal boot option. nothing can connect to x server and I'm not allowed to remove anything even under sudo. I installed a theme tonight that totally fried my os now it looks as I'm going to loose everything and restore the system :( I'm actually using 10.04 Lucid

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mark Phelps

Don't think that command is correct ...

Look in the link below, in the section about removing the proprietary driver, for the proper commands:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

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Oops. I was going off what I had read elsewhere. Looks like the proper command is

Code:

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sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx

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When mine got screwed up I just reinstalled the OS, only to find out later that the driver could be removed.