How to set NOMODESET and other kernel boot options in grub2

**jackson21** · March 29th, 2014

To P4man,
Great!!!!! Thank you so much for the detailed advice,
So far I have already seen on black screen the logos at the bottom
the keyboard and the mannikin for the kernel options
Will try ubuntu 14.04 beta2 with the nomodeset option

Thank you so much and greetings from Austria

jackson

**jackson21** · March 30th, 2014

14.04 is running, !!!
Thank you

**mark bower** · April 19th, 2014

In 12.04LTS I am using an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP video card which experiences boot problems. The system "misfires" maybe one of four initial boots, and locks up on a dark screen. And when it does this, the system can only be restarted by a hard turn off, ie, turn the power switch at the line off, then on. And sometimes this switch has to be recycled up to 3 times before the system will complete the boot process. The "on-off" switch and the "reset" button do not respond when the system locks up.

The following shows the radeon driver is in use.

rocky@mark:~$ lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV730 Pro AGP [Radeon HD 4600 Series] [1002:9495]
Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Device [1002:0028]
Kernel modules: radeon
01:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series] [1002:aa38]

Using "nomodeset" in grub worked wonders. I did this by going to /etc/default/grub and modifying the line
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX-DEFAULT = "quiet splash" to read
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX-DEFAULT = "quiet splash nomodeset"

Then I run update-grub2.

In addition to booting flawlessly, I note that the mouse pointer shows on a dark screen before the desktop opens.

**tj-quinn** · July 31st, 2014

Great tutorial. Thanks very much. Using the nomodeset option on the install medium (usb) solved my nvidia problem. After installation, the graphics were huge and wrong, of course. Installed latest nvidia driver, via "additional drivers" and then rebooted. All perfect.
Thx again.
Tim

**lilipop** · April 30th, 2015

hello,
i have partially solved my problem but when i get to the login screen and i enter my password then the screen turns black and i get again to the login screen to enter my data.
the same happens to the guest sessio, when i just click to enter i get a black screen and after 1 second i get back to the login scree.
akward....

**shadyyx** · July 21st, 2015

Hi guys.

Thanks for this useful information.

I ran into troubles on my Dell laptop with integrated Intel HD graphics right after upgrading from Ubuntu 14.10 to 15.04. With the upgrade all my graphical xserver-xorg drivers have been uninstalled and since I was running on three monitor setup (ntb + 2 monitors) the whole system has frozen during the upgrade process once the drivers were uninstalled. It took me an hour to realize that. After unplugging the monitors I could finally start a new session and finish the upgrade process. I am now allowed to plug in one additional monitor (with plugging in second one the system freezes completely). I tried to install the (old) xserver-xorg graphical drivers back again but it looks like they are out of effect on 15.04.

Unfortunately the system is not able to boot while the additional monitor is plugged in. Workaround was before restarting unplugging the monitor and after logging in plugging it back again.

The solution now is using the nomodeset option which allows me to keep the monitor plugged in.

I am looking forward to new version of Intel graphic drivers for Linux which should target Ubuntu 15.04 as well. It's like having one less eye when once used to working with three monitors and then one is gone...