Radeon 9 280 / HD 7950

[Nebelhom]

Hi folks,

A new PC, the usual ubuntu installation problems. This time after installation, GRUB does not want to show its beautiful grimace.

First my specs (the ones I think can be important):

Mainboard ASRock 970 Performance AM3+
Processor: AMD FX-6300 6-Core 3.5 GHz
Graphics Card: Radeon 9 280

Now here is what I have done so far:

Created a partition in Win 7 (30 GB) for ubuntu (for installation option "Something Else" ,because LiveCD did not recognise windows)

Created the following partitions

sda4: ext4 15 GB root "/"
sda5: ext4 12 GB /home
sda6: swap 4 GB

Tried Ubuntu 14.04 installation. This one worked, but I could not get the graphics card drivers installed. I cannot find the forum entries, but there is a bug that has not been yet fixed.

Sooooo, I remove 14.04 LTS and go back to 13.04 LTS.

I do the same as above and in addition I also create a 500 MB reserved bios boot area as I was told to do so by the installation guide.

Then the installation goes as usually, but then GRUB is not loaded on startup :(

Here are the guides that I tried, to no avail.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

1) The USB auto load, gave me a freeze screen saying the kernel went into panic mode

2) installation of boot-repair from live cd was not possible and it could not find boot-repair

http://howtoubuntu.org/how-to-repair-restore-reinstall-grub-2-with-a-ubuntu-live-cd

This worked fine, but it just did not do anything.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/88384/how-can-i-repair-grub-how-to-get-ubuntu-back-after-installing-windows

Same as above, looked like it worked fine, but it just did not do anything :(


And now I am at the end of line. A little frustrated as it is always the same game. I have been using ubuntu for a long time and each time I have some sort of trouble with it. Once it is running, I am very, veeeery happy, but the road to it just gets more and more annoying.

If anyone of you could give me a little hand with this, I would be super happy. Thanks in advance for all tries.

The rest who came here but cannot help me, enjoy your weekend :)

[mörgæs]

13.04 is not LTS, in fact it has been unsupported for more than a year.

I would reinstall 14.04.2 using only open source drivers to begin with. When that works we can take a look at additional drivers.

[Nebelhom]

13.04 is not LTS, in fact it has been unsupported for more than a year.

I would reinstall 14.04.2 using only open source drivers to begin with. When that works we can take a look at additional drivers.

@mörgæs

OK, I am back in Ubuntu 14.04. My resolution choices are either 1024x768 or 800x600.

Checked via Additional Drivers what I have installed for drivers and I see the following (see picture)

Any advice on what to install I greatly appreciate. Thank you for taking the time on the weekend to look at this.

[mörgæs]

I can't give more advice but a fellow moderator wrote this:
http://theleftcoastgeek.net/

Hope it helps.

[Nebelhom]

@mörgæs (You really want to make it easy for someone with an english keyboard ;) )

Thanks for your support. RE link: I found the other moderators ubuntu forums entries, but this blogpost I have not yet looked at. I'll report back to here, if I have any luck...

[Nebelhom]

So, following the guide at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD#Installing_via_the_command_line

At the step saying, install the drivers the following command:


sudo apt-get install fglrx

or any of the other variants given (with `-update` etc.)

Gives me the following output



Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
fglrx : Depends: xorg-video-abi-11 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-12 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-13 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-14 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-15
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.


Does anyone of you know how to resolve this issue?

Thanks :)

[Nebelhom]

*bumpedibomp*

Anyone has an idea about this?

Thanks in advance

[QIII]

Hello!

I reported a bug several weeks ago regarding this.

12.04.5 and 14.04.2, with the Hardware Enablement Stack, encounter what you have observed. At this time, the fglrx and fglrx-updates drivers are impossible to install without some changes I do not recommend.

Please go to the bug report and click "Affects me".

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/1424491

The work-arounds discussed in that thread all roll back the HWE. That defeats the purpose of the dot release. It it unclear to me at this point what putting your machine in that state will mean with regard to future updates.

If you have just reinstalled and have nothing to lose, I recommend reinstalling 14.04.1 and waiting until the bug is fixed before upgrading to 14.04.2

[Nebelhom]

@QIII

Thanks for your comment and the link FWIW.

I installed 14.04.2 newly and I cannot find an iso with 14.04.1. Could you link me to a repository where I can still download the older release?

Thank you very much!

[howefield]

Try http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04.1/

[Nebelhom]

@howefield: Perfect! Thank you very much for the link!

[Nebelhom]

Hi folks,

I just finished the installation of the 14.04.1.

The installation, unlike 14.04.2, told me on choosing "Something Else" and creating an ext4 (/) partition, ext4 (/home) partition and a swap that I need to make a ReservedBios partition with at least 1 MB (I assigned 500 MB). This was like the installation for 13.04.

Now, like with 13.04. After installation and restart, GRUB does not show itself and it loads Windows 7 directly (!?!?). Three questions for this.

1) Any idea, why it does that?
2) How much space should be typically assigned to a ReservedBIOS partition?
3) How can fix/avoid such behaviour

Regarding point 3, I tried Boot-Repair already and various other approaches as noted in my opening entry (see above)

Thanks for any input. Much appreciated.

[Nebelhom]

*bump*

Apologies, but I am still stuck on this one and I feel lost without my ubuntu :(