13.04 Won't boot on Toshiba Satellite (S855-S5170) with ATI Radeon GPU

[equiros]

Hi,

I tried to boot 13.04 from an USB stick in my Toshiba Satellite laptop (model S855-S5170), but I just get a black screen with a couple of purple flickering pixel lines at the top ...

I am currently using 12.10, but went through a PITA making it work; essentially because I had to stick with kernel version 3.5.0-17, since upgrading to any newer kernel version would produce the same result as with 13.04.

My laptop comes with an ATI Radeon GPU, and the Intel Graphics chipset can not be enabled on the BIOS (shame on me for not finding out more about this laptop before buying it) ... but it seems like the Radeon card is not well supported after 3.5.0-17; I had to lock this package version in Synaptic to avoid getting updates that would render the system unusable.



I am concerned that I will not be able to upgrade to any newer Ubuntu version in the future because of this problem ...

This is the line from lspci corresponding to the GPU:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Thames XT/GL [Radeon HD 7600M Series]


Does anyone of the Ubuntu gurus out there know of something I could try (maybe in the kernel startup parameters) to make anything past 3.5.0-17 to work??

Any help will be deeply appreciated!!!

Thanks!

[porthuon]

I get exactly the same thing on a brand new Satellite L850.

I can boot and install 12.10 (kernel 3.8.0-19) without any problems but I get the same symptoms as you when I try 13.04.
Sometimes it's a flickering orange screen, other times it's completely blank.

lspci gives:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Thames XT [Radeon HD 7670M]


EDIT: Success! I turned off secure boot and selected CSM? instead of UEFI in the bios and it now boots. Not so good if you want to dual boot with Windows 8 but I can live with the loss

Regards
Geoff

[tom2012]

I can confirm both: I have the same problem (beyond kernel 3.5.0-17 absolutely no ubuntu distribution works) and the solution does work for me (setting boot to CFM in BIOS lets me boot 13.04 from live USB stick, from which I am writing now). Yet, now and then I do need access to windows on the same laptop, and having to switch boot mode every time is a bit tedious. I am disappointed that I cannot even find this as a bug somewhere, so it seems nobody cares...

[kokoshmusun]

I had the same problem with Toshiba Satellite L830-135 with ATI Radeon. I would get a black screen at log-in. I booted, pressed Shift, entered Grub and highlighted Ubuntu and pressed "e". Then added "nomodeset" at the end of the line that ends with "quite splash." I am now writing from within Ubuntu. I'm not sure if this will have permanent effect, but I can edit the grub now so that this always works. I got the help from: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132