(solved - 4 me) nvidia boot consoles scrambled

mbrehon · Last edited by mbrehon on Thu Jul 31, 2008 3:46 am; edited 1 time in total

I wasn't quite sure where this should be asked, but here goes...

This is not a critical problem, but a recent update to something on three different gentoo machines all with nvidia (2 5200's, 1 7200) cards changed something. All three are showing the boot console with the text mode pixels scrambled for most of the boot init phase (while showing all of the "starting <someservice> [OK]" messages). Near the end of the boot init phase (when the nvidia module is loaded?) the screen clears up, even "starting <someservice>" messages that were scrambled just milliseconds prior. So its not like the scrambled messages just scroll up off the screen, the scrambled state is a property of the entire displayed screen. There is no problem that I can see then with X, everything seems fine.

All machines are running mostly stable profiles and kernel 2.6.24-r8. Oh, and no fancy console framebuffer.

Also each of the three uses a different display connection, 1 VGA, 1 DVI, and 1 S-Video. All three use nvidia-drivers-173.14.09. Two systems are x86_64 and one is x86. One of the x86_64 uses a PCIe card, others are AGP.

Sounds goofy, but it kinda seems like maybe the video driver leaves the video card in a funky state when shutting down... but how would it maintain that goofy state thru a power cycle??? I just debunked that theory by downgrading to nvidia-drivers-169.12 and rebooting twice to no effect.

It seems to correct somewhere around the following boot init messages [keywords remembered]:
setting key mappings
setting terminal encoding to UTF-8
setting user font

Maybe its a kernel config??? But I haven't recompiled the kernel on one of them since May 12, this problem is much more recent...

Thanks for any ideas,
-Mark

EDIT: Yes, I was missing splash.xpm.gz in /boot/grub on all systems. Thanks all!

d2_racing · Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 8:34 pm Post subject:

Hi, can you post your /etc/X11/xorg.conf plz ?

bbetro · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2008 Posts: 3

I had a similar problem and solved it changing reference to spalsh.xpm.gz in /boot/grub/menu.lst to one of the new splash images which are installed in /boot/grub/ after

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5947

i had this same problem... happened to my ati-based laptop too...

sundialsvc4 · Guru Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 436

The problem indeed will turn out to be that the splash-image file is gone.

You'll find another one elsewhere on your hard drive. Copy it to "/boot/grub" and the problem will magically disappear.

robbat2 · Developer Joined: 19 Feb 2003 Posts: 82

The grub ebuild is designed to either automatically run the setup_boot_dir block (which is also used by pkg_config) automatically if at all possible (/boot needs to be mounted), or to display a message that it's absolutely critical for the user to do so.
If it DID run setup_boot_dir, you should have a line like:

speeddemon · Apprentice Joined: 27 Sep 2003 Posts: 162

Yet another person that was affected by the same bug.

Just updated yesterday, thought it was nvidia-drivers, but yes, it updated to grub .97-r6, splash.xpm.gz was there previously, still is in /usr/share/grub, but the update deleted it.
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