Fglrx causes serious bug-black screen!

I downloaded newest driver from Ati site and installed it...

Now at start-up I see a black screen and message:

"Your screen,graphics card,and input device settings could not be detected correctly.You will need to configure these yourself."

I press enter and move to next screen with message:

"What would you like to do?"

and listed below:

"Run in low graphics mode for just one session."

(it is marked) and some other options that could not possibly to mark with TAB or up,down,left,right or shift key... (no cursor). I can not login to system and can not use it! What should I do?

Solution 1:

(1) Check if fglrx is blacklisted. (This was my solution on my HP pavilion dv7 with a AMD/Ati Radeon HD 6770M)

To do that you can grep through all of the files in /etc/modprobe.d/:

grep fglrx /etc/modprobe.d/*

In my case this gives following output:

blacklist-local.conf:blacklist fglrx
fglrx.conf:# This file was installed by fglrx
fglrx.conf:alias fglrx fglrx

All I had to do is to edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-local.conf file and comment out line with blacklist fglrx by inserting # in front of the line. So it looks like this now:

# blacklist fglrx
credits: Gumili(link)

(2) Reinstall fglrx

apt-get install fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-updates

(3) Re-run fglrx initiate

 amdconfig --initial -f

Here is the documentation this command

AMD Initial Configuration:
  --initial
        Generate a default AMD device section in the configuration file which
        is capable of loading the fglrx driver.
 --initial=dual-head
        Same as '--initial' but generate a basic dual head configuration file.
  --initial=check
        Identifies if the fglrx driver is present in configuration file.

(4) Reboot

Solution 2:

First of all, in Ubuntu 12.04 I had AMD Catalyst Display Driver 12.6 on my HP Pavilion g7-1075dx (ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250) running great for about one week with my 24" second monitor (as Generic Non-PnP monitor in Windows) 1920x1080 via HDMI cable (through SVGA cable I couldn't get a high resolution). I downloaded the driver from http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/legacy/Pages/legacy-radeon_linux.aspx.

I must have not disconnected the 2nd monitor gracefully before shutting down, because when I booted up this morning I got this black screen.

I spent 3 hours getting my laptop to successfully boot up again.

The key is to be able to make changes to the hard drive: Boot up then hold down the Shift key to get the GRUB bootloader menu. Arrow down to to the first Ubuntu version with (recovery mode).

You will get the Recovery Menu (filesystem state: read-only). You want to change it to write to the file system: arrow down to dpkg Repair broken packages and press enter. Do Yes to remount filesystem in read/write mode.

Next, apt-get upgrade will run automatically in the terminal session; let it go and at the end press N to not continue and to not start the upgrade.

Then apt-get upgrade will churn some more then say Finished, please press ENTER; press Enter which will then take you back to the Recovery Menu but now you are in filesystem read/write state.

Next, arrow down to root Drop to root shell prompt, give the password, and voila you have a root prompt on a read/write file system.

I tried Apple16's excellent suggestions:
(1) I commented out the line in blacklist-local.conf and then once again including commenting out a line in blacklist-fglrx.conf and rebooted but it didn't work.
Also, (2) and (3) did not work for me but they might for you.

Finally, I decided to revert to square zero: Back up /etc/X11/xorg.conf and copy xorg.conf.failsafe over it. Then reboot and at least now the PC is usable. Next for me it's back to reinstalling the graphics drivers again.