OK, so I decided to upgrade my video card in my Fedora 11 box. But when I fire it up, it won’t load X, or even boot. I look up what to do, and the instructions seem to say to install the latest Ndivia video drivers. So I put the old card back in and do so. Still no joy. So I put the old card back in, and this time it won’t even boot with the old card.
OK, so I have to somehow undo what I’ve done. But I can’t boot the machine.
Here is the problem. The machine pays no attention to keyboard commands during boot (e.g., I cannot get into the BIOS with DEL.) Which means that I can’t tell it to boot at a lower level to bypass X. In other words, I cannot boot.
Well, OK. So I burn a DVD of Fedora 13, and figure I’ll just rescue and upgrade at the same time.
But the Fedora DVD doesn’t recognize my keyboard either, until after it gets into the upgrade process, so I can’t just do a rescue. So I go ahead and upgrade. It says all the packages are installed, and reboot. I reboot, and it still can’t boot, because apparently the upgrade didn’t fix the video problem. And because I don’t have keyboard at boot, or even DVD initialization, I still can’t boot into terminal mode to fix the problem. I tried loading Knoppix, but I can’t figure out how to use it to see the Fedora drive. When I try to mount the drive, it says it doesn’t recognize the lpm2vp filesystem type.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
[Tuesday morning update]
OK, I’m updating from the machine using Knoppix, and I’ve mounted the drive. Now I just have to see if I can figure out what to do to fix it. Ideally, I’d uninstall the drivers that I installed, but I don’t have yum available in this mode, so I’m going to see if blacklisting Nouveau will fix it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Dang. Nouveau is already blacklisted (it must have happened automagically when I installed the Nvidia drivers). Now I don’t know what to do to fix the problem.
[Update early afternoon]
OK, so I can boot into runlevel 3. I can’t bring up eth0 (it says that the device is not managed by NetworkManager — Google provides no clue as to what the problem could be), so I have no network connectivity with the box. When I telinit 5, it tells me that it’s disabled the nvidia drivers because it’s missing the nividia.ko for the new Fedora 13 kernel. The default driver in xorg.conf is vesa. As it continues to try to get to runlevel 5, it flashes a few times, but then quits. And the last line it displays is “Starting NMB services” which is says failed. It then just sits there until I ctrl-C out of the attempt, at which point I’m back to runlevel 3.
Any ideas?
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, the good news is that the machine is bootable, so in the last resort I can just back up /home and do a clean install.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hoorah! I stopped NetworkManager, and brought up eth0, and I now have an ssh connection to the machine from my laptop, so I have a place to back up. Though I’m starting to think that I should just go out and buy a new drive for a clean install, and then copy files over to it, and use the old drive for a mirror.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I removed akmod-nvidia, but I still get the same behavior when trying to telinit 5, and it still hangs at “Starting NMB services.”
[Update a while later]
Success! Almost. I reinstalled the nvidia drivers, following the instructions for Fedora 13, including editing grub.conf to blacklist nouveau. Then I shut down, put in the new video card, and rebooted. This time, when I telinited 5, it finally came up. The only problem now is that the screen isn’t displaying fully (that is, there is an inch of so of black on each side and a half inch top and bottom on my 22: LG monitor). Also, the highest resolution available from screen preferences is 1280 x 1024 (and I’m actually using 1280 x 720 to better match my screen ratio). I’m looking at the monitor manual to see if there’s anything I can do to enlarge the display, but I may also have to hack the X config file to get higher res. I assume that I can now reset the default to boot into level 5.
I think the lpm2vp binaries might have to be downloaded through the package manager. I think if you google it you may find the package link straight to the upgrade.
“Does anyone have any suggestions?”
Buy a Mac.
OK, this may sound sophomoric, but will it boot AT ALL? Have you tried a boot disc of some type? Anything that will self boot, with the old video card.
I question whether the new video card “cooked” the system board.
You seem to be describing a situation where it started minus video, tried to start, tried almost to start, then won’t start at all. If it won’t boot, all the videa cards in China won’t help. But a bad card, of any stripe, can kill a system board sometimes.
Consider giving up 5 or 6 gigs to a Slackware installation from a year or two ago. Set up Slack to see your Fedora drives, and tinker with your settings from Slack. It ain’t elegant, but it works!
And you might want to reinstall grub or doublecheck your disk partition assignments — my past experience with Fedora suggests that RedHat just doesn’t number the initial sectors on a disk the way MSDOS or Windows or other Linux versions do, often causing unpleasantness during bootup.
Does it really not boot, or is it just a matter of it goes into X which then displays a black screen? There’s a key sequence that I’ve long since forgotten–maybe Ctrl-Alt-F6–to get to the console, and another one to kill the X server and drop you back to a shell prompt.
This is a good reason for not booting directly into X.
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server, IF it’s getting that far, and, yeah, Ctrl-Alt-Fx where Fx is a function key. Typically (in the old days) You’d have something like 5 consoles started by default. IIRC you could go to the second one or something and try to kill the server, again, IF it’s getting that far. If it’s really not booting at all, I dunno what to suggest.
I don’t think that the video card damaged the hardware. I think that the software change I made in an attempt to use it is preventing if from booting. And yes, it will not boot. I can’t get a console with ctrl-alt-Fx.
There’s a brief message that flashes on the screen that probably holds a clue to the problem before it hangs, but it goes by too fast to see it.
The problem is that I have two unrelated problems. One is the video issue. The other is the fact that, pre-boot, the machine doesn’t recognize the keyboard (otherwise I’d just boot into init 3, or rescue mode from a disk). I’m afraid that the only solution is a new (or at least different, though this is the only x64 one I have) mobo that I can actually access with the KB without an OS. Maybe it’s telling me it’s time for an upgrade.
What the heck is this lpm2vp thingy? Are you by chance talking about an LVM system? There’s a how-to on them. Apparetly you have to sometimes do tricks before you can mount logical volumes:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/LVM-HOWTO.html
Another possibility that comes vaguely to mind is to try to boot a kernel that has been told to use the serial port as a console, then use another machine to communicate with the beast that way — you won’t need the keyboard or the screen.
I switched from Fedora to Arch Linux recently, so I have had to learn how to access LVM volumes using command-line tools only. Download, burn, and boot the latest netinstall image, and see the Arch Linux Wiki page on LVM for how to mount LVM volumes. The process involves loading a kernel module (‘dm-mod’?), using ‘vgchange -a y’ to activate your volume groups, and then mounting /dev/VGNAME/LVNAME.
By the way, I think you typoed ‘lvm2pv’ as ‘lvm2vp’ above.
Does the keyboard and video work with a live CD? If it runs the livecd than you know the keyboard and video will potentially work. Just a matter of recovering your data and then wiping and reinstalling.
Are you using a USB keyboard? And if so, do you have a PS/2 keyboard port that you can use instead so the BIOS will recognize a keyboard and let you enter commands before it’s too late? I had a similar problem (at least as far as the keyboard thing goes) on a MB a few years back, and that was the route I had to take, I had to keep a PS/2 keyboard around just for emergencies with that box.
BTW, is this a USB or a PS/2 keyboard? If your motherboard has both I’d rather go with PS/2 keyboard.
It sounds like your BIOS got set to disable legacy USB support which kills the USB keyboard and mouse until the Plug n’ Play operating system loads.
LoL; great minds I see.
““Does anyone have any suggestions?”
Buy a Mac.”
Heck, even Windows would be better than this headache. Win 7 is a pretty decent OS, all things considered.
My limited experience is with Ubuntu, so this may not apply. Does Grub allow you to boot into a recovery mode similar to Windows Safe Mode? And, if so, can you?
Second, could you pull the hard drive and connect it to another machine, perhaps a rental, where you can play with it, and perhaps reinstall your last backup.
Having a second computer available brings up Stalin’s old saying about quantity having a quality all it’s own (badly paraphrased and maybe not from Stalin, but that’s normal for me.).
Are you using a USB keyboard?
No, it’s PS2. Sorry.
Buy a Mac.
Obviously, I was looking for solutions that don’t involve spending lots of money on a machine with whose OS I am unfamiliar and joining a cult. 😉
Does Grub allow you to boot into a recovery mode similar to Windows Safe Mode?
Grub?
[Voice=”Heartbroken Jewish Father”] I have no Grub [/Voice]
Didn’t you hear me say that there is no keyboard prior to boot? If I had Grub, I’d boot into init 3.
There are too many unknown details. Which kind of keyboard USB or PS/2? Which graphics card model? What is the exact display you get during boot? Does the BIOS do a POST properly? What happens, step by step?
If you are running Linux you can ask the system to give you a hardware list by typing:
“lspci -vv”
In the console.
I agree that PS/2 keyboards have fewer issues as another poster said. USB ports get broken easily and USB interface chips go the way of the dodo quite often.
I use Ubuntu which comes with the NVIDIA binary drivers bundled. AFAIK Fedora prefers to use open source video drivers which may be kind of rough around the edges, especially on newer graphics hardware.
I suspect your graphics card should still work in VESA mode:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs#Miscellaneous_graphical_problems
However I do not know how you can force Fedora 13 into VESA mode without a working keyboard during boot, or console access.
I would suggest you try fixing your issues one at a time, starting from the beginning. Get the BIOS to recognize the keyboard first.
Well, if it’s a messed up BIOS preventing you from using the keyboard, you could try removing the CMOS battery, waiting a while for the motherboard capacitors to discharge, replacing the battery and hoping the subsequent reset-to-defaults works for you. The clock will reset, too.
Some motherboards also allow you to short across jumpers to do the same, it varies with the manufacturer.
That only gets you back halfway to where you want to be (Linux video card hell) but it’s a start.
“Obviously, I was looking for solutions that don’t involve spending lots of money on a machine with whose OS I am unfamiliar and joining a cult. ;-)”
The spending a lot of money part is true, but once you’ve done it you have a problem-free, powerful platform whose ease of use is simply breathtaking — and it’s not too strong a statement to say that you already are familiar with the OS, because everything you need to do is self-evident.
I was recently taken by surprise by a college friend of mine, who started life as a computer science major and wound up with a PhD, doing fundamental research at NASA Glenn. His father was a top IBM computer troubleshooter from the days of mechanical computers until the introduction of the PC. I was talking to him the other day, and he said that after seeing that all of the most productive people at Glenn used Macs. He looked into it, and discovered why. And after showing his father what the Mac could do, his father was completely on board.
When I said “But what do you do about running codes like MathCad or legacy DOS codes that aren’t supported on a Mac.” He said, “Then I just run the Mac’s Windows emulator — which, by the way, runs faster than any of my Windows machines did.”
My wife has a Mac Book (as does my friend), and I have to admit that it’s kind of nice to be able to use a machine without having to know how it works. Rush Limbaugh once compared it to flying. He loves flying, but isn’t a pilot. He said if you just want to enjoy flying, you buy a ticket and go. If you want to participate in flying, you become a pilot with all the technical detail and work that implies. A Mac allows you to just buy a ticket and enjoy yourself, while a PC is like having to be a pilot.
Agree with Godzilla. Get into the BIOS first.
1. What is the make and model of the motherboard/computer? (if nothing else, I want to know so that I can stay away 😀 )
2. Are you certain that DEL takes you into BIOS config for that mobo?
3. Are you sure that the DEL key is working on your keyboard?
Well, I was going to jump on the USB versus PS/2 keyboard thing, but you tell us that’s a dead end. Have you replaced the CMOS RAM battery and reset the settings manually by pulling the jumper? Also, pulling the hard drive cable may freeze the screen so that you can see what it’s saying.
And ditto Ben Zeen: what make and model of mobo?
Knoppix doesnt work ? I have a hard time believing that. Did you try an Ubuntu CD instead?
What was the partition layout on your Fedora disk ?
lpm2vp is not a filesystem that i ( or google ) recognize.
I second on a possible dead key on the keyboard.
If you have or can find motherboard docs, there’s a jumper on pretty much all ATX motherboards to reset BIOS settings to default. If all else fails that may restore your keyboard.
Are you certain that DEL takes you into BIOS config for that mobo?
I only know what it tells me. It says it does.
3. Are you sure that the DEL key is working on your keyboard?
I know that ctrl-alt-del reboots. Once it has actually started booting…
I also know that no key has any effect until it does.
MfK…please.
I have a Mac and I love it. But no Apple computers are trouble-free unless you install and use outside developers’ maintenance utilities or don’t keep them long enough to necessitate installing major upgrades of the OS. Just dip your toes into the Apple forums if you don’t believe me.
Some people don’t want to just buy a ticket to fly. They not only want to pilot the plane themselves, they want to tinker with its motor. They’re Linux users, and I say 3 cheers to them for giving the big boys a run for their money and for dreaming up new ways for other intrepid souls to have fun getting things done on their computers.
It’s seldom what you think, otherwise you would have cured the problem by now. Low-cost (and probably too obvious) troubleshooting for really basic stuff:
* Try booting from a Ubuntu live CD or a live CD from some other flavor of Linux.
* Go down to your friendly neighborhood Goodwill store and buy another PS/2 keyboard for a couple of bucks, if you don’t already have a spare lying around.
* Swap as many hardware items (PCI boards, peripherals, whatever) between your malfunctioning system and a spare system.
Yeah, you prolly did all that already …
One nice thing about Macs is that you can boot into Target Mode. This has saved me on more than one occasion …
Since you haven’t announced that your immediate problem (of mounting your Fedora partition) is solved, here is a step-by-step procedure to mount an LVM logical volume from the command line.
Run (as root):
# modprobe dm-mod
# vgchange -a y
The first command will load the ‘device mapper’ kernel module. The second command will tell the Logical Volume Manager to ‘activate’ all volume groups that it can find; it will also print the names of the volume groups it activates. For this example, I will use foo-vg.
(If # vgchange -a y does not print the name of your volume group, run # vgs. The volume group may have already been activated.)
To see a list of logical volumes in the volume group foo-vg, run any one of the following commands (# indicates a command that must be run as root):
$ ls /dev/foo-vg
# lvs foo-vg
# lvs
(You can also use ($ ls /dev/mapper), which contains a block device for each logical volume, but I don’t want to explain the name mangling that directory uses.)
To mount a logical volume named LogVol00 in the volume group foo-vg on /mymnt/lv00, run (as root):
# mount /dev/foo-vg/LogVol00 /mymnt/lv00
I do not have a Fedora 11 installation or CD around to test this with, but the above procedure would work on my Fedora 12 system, it worked for me with the current (2010.05) Arch Linux netinstall image, and since the Knoppix package list includes lvm2, it should work on Knoppix.
@Mike G in Corvallis: “One nice thing about Macs is that you can boot into Target Mode.”
Thing is, you need a working keyboard to tell Open Firmware to go into Target Mode, and that is part of the problem here. If “Delete” doesn’t work, why should we expect “T” to work?
I’m no real expert, but DEL not doing anything during the boot sequence means to me one of three things; dead keyboard or at least dead DEL key (easy to fix) or some sort of corruption/bad setting in the BIOS (resetting BIOS by using the jumper or removing the battery has worked for me in the past) or possibly a damaged motherboard – or even a power supply damaged by overstraining it with a GFX card that draws too much power.
Pull your cards out and re-seat them in their slots. Including the memory and those you did not pull out during the procedure. Not a big suggestion, but less has done more. My dad recently had a “crashing at random” problem after a long trip with his laptop. Re-seating the memory did the trick. Perhaps the card(s) weren’t seated as well as thought, or something else got knocked loose.
Does the display look correct during the BIOS-controlled part of boot? (Displays self-test data, copyright etc etc.) If not, there’s a hardware issue, probably insufficient power to video card – many newer video boards on old PCs require a direct connection to power supply as well as power through the PCI/AGP socket, and have a connector for that.
If that’s ok, it’s probably just a matter of a bad video driver. Once the machine is up, does Ctrl-Alt-1 or Ctl-Alt-6 (I forget which virtual console is which in Fedora these days) switch to a text screen? Failing that, can you get in via ssh or telnet (!) from another host once the machine is up?
Failing that, you probably need a live-cd of some kind (you could try one other than your install CD, don’t know what’s best for that), change the default run-level from 5 to 3 (disable graphic login) by editing the “initdefault” entry in /etc/inittab and proceed to repair from there.
Video driver support, especially 3D stuff, is probably some of the ugliest hackery remaining around Linux these days…
I’m not a LINUX guy but I’ve had similar experience on a WinXP machine with a too-fast glimpse of blue-screen and a boot problem. I grabbed my video camera and recorded the screen during boot, then played it back and frame-by-framed it to get to the frame that showed the on-screen message. Once I knew the stop code, I was able to google the answer. Might work for you, too?
If its not working with the PS/2 keyboard your probably hosed. Those should work regardless of the BIOS setting. This motherboard is showing all the signs of flaking out. Probably a good idea to just head down to Fry’s. Though you will likely find more and more motherboards are using USB only for the keyboard and mouse. So, you will likely need a new keyboard anyways. If you want to get a USB keyboard and try that on your present system it would be interesting to see if it starts working.
Have you tried logging in from another machine? Can you ping it?
No, I haven’t tried pinging it. I just assumed that since I couldn’t get a terminal, that it hadn’t booted (and that wasn’t a keyboard problem, because I could reboot with a three-finger salute). But that’s worth a try, I guess.
If you do succeed in logging in remotely you could try ssh -X root@xxx yum.
Well… short-term, you might be able to force it to use the generic “VESA” driver instead of any of the non-working ones; I believe the best place to target this would be changing the reference to the device driver in Xorg.conf (is that /etc or /etc/X11 or /etc/Xorg in Fedora?) from “noveau” to “vesa”. Probably.
That would at least give you graphics. Or, as noted, you could disable graphics entirely by setting default runlevel to 3 and rebooting into a terminal-mode Fedora.
Rand: A Mac Mini’s only $600, and OSX is Unix(tm). Just sayin’.
How much are these constant headaches with linux upgrades costing you in terms of time and effort?
Neither my time nor my effort are free, which is why I use linux as a server platform I upgrade only when I’m replacing the hardware. Not using X on it drastically reduces the problem space.
X is what keeps linux from having a chance on the desktop for mass acceptance.
(Plus what Josh said – that hardware sounds dubious at best, and motherboards are cheap – at least for older CPUs. And I’m guessing this ain’t an i7-920 or anything.)
What happened to me last weekend. Got some sort of power surge (Yes, i have a surge protector) that fried my hard drive. Replaced that and loaded the OS, during the load it wanted to verify with MS, but gave me a connection error. Turns out that the surge also fried the onboard ethernet. Plugged in an old ethernet card and i am back and operating. I thought. Then i found i couldn’t print anything. went to reload the print drivers and it told me it couldn’t find any printers attached. Hmmm, the printer is connected via a USB connection that happens to be right below the onboard ethernet connection. Looks like it also fried the USB connector. Could it be that your keyboard is plugged into a bad USB?
Even if noveau is already blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia.conf, it might not be blacklisted in the initrd (Initial Ram Disk). You can rebuild your initrd by using dracut like so:
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
This will work just so if you are able to ssh in from another machine when Fedora is booted.
If you boot from Knoppix, you’ll need to mount all your Fedora filesystems under, say, /mnt, /mnt/boot, and so on, and then chroot into it if possible. You’ll need to manually type the kernel release from your Fedora install rather than using uname -r in this case. As to populating the chroot’d /dev, you’ll probably need to populate it from the Knoppix one via cpio before you chroot into it.
If all this seems overly complex for the Knoppix boot, you could manually unpack the initrd, into a tree, modify it (the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia.conf file), and repack it as it is only a gzip’d cpio file. Be aware of the fact that it drops everything in the current directory, so you’ll probably want to be in an empty initramfs directory first.
Well, I rebuilt initrd per the instructions, but still no joy booting into run level 5. I can boot into 3, though. I’ve booted back into Knoppix, but now I see that there’s no ssh. What a pain.
OK, I’ve got the machine booted at level 3, but now I can’t get eth0 up, so I have no network connection (and can’t do yum installs, or ssh into it).
That’s peculiar; runlevel 2 should be “text console, no networking” – level 3 is supposed to be “text console, full networking”.
See wikipedia on runlevels.
Is that off the old (disk) image, or the Knoppix livecd?
If it’s the Fedora image, probably it’s the new “Network manager” utility going wonky on you; it was originally designed to handle transient wifi etc. for laptops, as far as I can tell, but somehow became standard. Have a look at this discussion thread to see if that helps you get the networking back.
It’s off the old image (upgraded from Fedora 11 to Fedora 13).
Or, again, you could try switching the driver from the Nvidia one to, I think, “vesa” – it will be lousy, but will probably work. Getting into graphical mode might actually fix the network problems, if it really is NetworkManager causing the issues.
I looked at that discussion, but it was about a problem of the network not coming up at boot time. It has no clues about what to do if you can’t bring up the interface manually (with ifup).
You can take a look in the xorg logs in /var/log/ to see what issues the vesa driver is running into.
NetworkManager, in my semi-informed opinion, is the Work of the Devil and should be a default only on laptops, and probably is causing your network issues. Hava a look at the files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts for your networking configuration. I think it’s also possible you might need to do something lunatic like ifup eth1 or eth2 because it’s created virtual interfaces and moved the real ones around.
YMMV, void where prohibited. FWIW, before upgrading video I recommend 1) setting default runlevel to 3, and then 2) using “startx” to initiate graphic console for test. Fine advice now, I know…
Here’s the output from Xorg.0.log (after a listing of attributes):
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Total Memory: 2048 64KB banks (131072kB): Using hsync range of 31.50-0.00 kHz : Using vrefresh range of 56.00-0.00 Hz : Using hsync range of 31.50-0.00 kHz : Using vrefresh range of 56.00-0.00 Hz : Using hsync range of 31.50-0.00 kHz : Using vrefresh range of 50.00-0.00 Hz
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0):
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0):
[ 4607.081] (WW) VESA(0): Unable to estimate virtual size
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “1280×1024” (no mode of this name)
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “1024×768” (no mode of this name)
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “800×600” (no mode of this name)
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “640×480” (no mode of this name)
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “640×400” (no mode of this name)
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×400” (no mode of this name)
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×240” (no mode of this name)
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×200” (no mode of this name)
[ 4607.081] (WW) VESA(0): No valid modes left. Trying less strict filter…
[ 4607.081] (II) VESA(0):
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0):
[ 4607.082] (WW) VESA(0): Unable to estimate virtual size
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “1280×1024” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “1024×768” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “800×600” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “640×480” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “640×400” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×400” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×240” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×200” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (WW) VESA(0): No valid modes left. Trying aggressive sync range…
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0):
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0):
[ 4607.082] (WW) VESA(0): Unable to estimate virtual size
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “1280×1024” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “1024×768” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “800×600” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “640×480” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “640×400” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×400” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×240” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode “320×200” (unknown reason)
[ 4607.082] (EE) VESA(0): No valid modes
[ 4607.082] (II) UnloadModule: “vesa”
[ 4607.082] (II) UnloadModule: “int10”
[ 4607.082] (II) Unloading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/libint10.so
[ 4607.082] (II) UnloadModule: “vbe”
[ 4607.082] (II) Unloading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/libvbe.so
[ 4607.082] (EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.
[ 4607.082]
Fatal server error:
[ 4607.082] no screens found
[ 4607.082]
Sounds like it can’t figure out what resolutions/refresh-rates the monitor supports. You could try deleting the xorg.conf and seeing if it can pick all that up automatically, or edit it by hand, or there are some utilities which seem to change with every distribution and version – maybe system-config-display.
I upgraded my old Linux box to a new ATI card recently, and have been chicken to fiddle any OS settings since…! I get the feeling that the stuff with free drivers (older ATI cards, and especially the Intel built-in graphics) works much more smoothly.