Black screen with nvidia 6629 driver

[mtvoid]

This is what your system reported...

Host Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8385 [K8T800 AGP] Host Bridge

I noticed that the K8T800 was added to the nvidia's agp support list only with driver ver. 6629, it wasn't there in 6111. Of course, the docs say that the system's own agpgart should work anyway. In your case, maybe the nvidia driver has problems using agp with your motherboard, which probably still isn't well-supported yet (were you able to run your system on previous versions of the driver?). Still, the problem being discussed in this thread of messed up displays has more to do with the card's chipset, which judging by most of the posts here, is being seen with the TNT2/M64 and GF4 MX440. Whether AGP is enabled or not certainly does seem to affect the output on the screen, but it does not really remedy the situation.

[Pajarico]

I agree, it seems more a matter of graphic chipset rather than mobo chipset.
Replying to your question "were you able to run your system on previous versions of the driver?" the answer is yes and no; yes because previous versions (from 49.99 till 61.11) compiled, loaded and worked ok; and no because the performance was poor specially on 3d applications, maybe because the AGP bus was disabled....i didn't check it then and don't know if it is even possible to run 3d stuff without the AGP (can anyone confirm? )

[zander]

There are known problems with TNT2 and some GeForce4 440MX cards.

[mr-k]

known for who ? Most here didnt have any problems with drivers 6111, only with 6629.

[Willski]

I'm having the same problem on my third monitor (GeForce4 MX 4000) and I'm running an Intel 850E chipset.

Oddly the other two monitors, which are connected to a GeForce 5950, don't have the problem at all.

[mr-k]

That means problem is olny with old cards and it dont depend from system or mobo.

[Willski]

My card is PCI, so it's probably not an AGP issue either.

[tiangha]

Just wanted to say that I too am experiencing a black screen problem when starting X on my laptop which has a 16MB Geforce2 Go and runs Fedora Core 3. In my case, however, I don't get an NVIDIA logo (don't have nologo enabled in my xorg.conf in order to test to see if the driver works) and I don't get a mouse pointer either. Can't CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to the command line, and I have to kill the power to turn it off. It truely is a black screen, and it appears that the LCD doesn't even recieve power.

However, I have another system (SiS 741GX chipset, Geforce4 MX440 8x) which works perfectly with Fedora Core 3 after using that udev fix. So not every MX440 card is affected. Perhaps the 8x cards are immune?

[FRidh]

Originally Posted by tiangha

Just wanted to say that I too am experiencing a black screen problem when starting X on my laptop which has a 16MB Geforce2 Go and runs Fedora Core 3. In my case, however, I don't get an NVIDIA logo (don't have nologo enabled in my xorg.conf in order to test to see if the driver works) and I don't get a mouse pointer either. Can't CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to the command line, and I have to kill the power to turn it off. It truely is a black screen, and it appears that the LCD doesn't even recieve power.

I've got the same problem, although I have the logo enabled. When X starts, I see the logo for just a second flickering in my screen. Than my screen turns black, and the monitor doesn't respond at all. When I press CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE I see the logo, just before it disappears again.

I run SuSE Linux 9.1 with kernel 2.6.8.
I've got a Asus P4P800 motherboard, and a GF MX440 graphics card (agp 4x).

Now I can't get in Linux anymore using X, only in text.

[johnschipper]

I'm running FC3 final distribution (single processor not smp kernel).
I had the black screen with no mouse and freezing at startx and this finally helped me but this is my hardware.

6600 GT PCIe
Dell GX280

Get system into init level 3 by changing /etc/inittab and rebooting.

I removed the current Nvidia 6629 drivers that were not currently working.
./nvidia-installer --uninstall

Downloaded from kernel.org the 2.6.9 kernel.
Untarred it in /usr/src

Copied the original config in /boot/config-2.6.9-1.xxx into /usr/src/linux-2.6.9
Run make oldconfig.

After failing to make the kernel I had to at this point remove from the scsi modules all the qla drivers (would not compile)
make; make modules; make modules_install

Removed the alias statement for nvidia (from my previous attempts) in the /etc/modules.conf

Reboot into new kernel. At this point there is a warning aboot tty when loginning in at init 3 level. I have ignored this for now.

Now I re-installed the Nvidia driver (I also applied the PCI patch from zandros).
I did not have to update the xorg.conf because I had already done from previous failed attempts.
./Nvidia-Linux-xxxx.run --extract-only
applied PCIe patch.
./nvidia-installer
modprobe nvidia
startx
Add there it was.

Hope i did'nt miss a step

Hope this helps even one person (running FC3) and BTW this system could run with FC2 (2.6.9 kernel) so I'm now wondering that my black screen was caused by a FC3 kernel + nvidia conflict.
JKS

[johnschipper]

Oops forgot to mention I've also done the udev FC3 fix and remove rhgb quite from grub menu.lst but have yet to fully test it.

I'm running FC3 final distribution (single processor not smp kernel).
I had the black screen with no mouse and freezing at startx and this finally helped me but this is my hardware.

6600 GT PCIe
Dell GX280

Get system into init level 3 by changing /etc/inittab and rebooting.

I removed the current Nvidia 6629 drivers that were not currently working.
./nvidia-installer --uninstall

Downloaded from kernel.org the 2.6.9 kernel.
Untarred it in /usr/src

Copied the original config in /boot/config-2.6.9-1.xxx into /usr/src/linux-2.6.9
Run make oldconfig.

After failing to make the kernel I had to at this point remove from the scsi modules all the qla drivers (would not compile)
make; make modules; make modules_install

Removed the alias statement for nvidia (from my previous attempts) in the /etc/modules.conf

Reboot into new kernel. At this point there is a warning aboot tty when loginning in at init 3 level. I have ignored this for now.

Now I re-installed the Nvidia driver (I also applied the PCI patch from zandros).
I did not have to update the xorg.conf because I had already done from previous failed attempts.
./Nvidia-Linux-xxxx.run --extract-only
applied PCIe patch.
./nvidia-installer
modprobe nvidia
startx
Add there it was.

Hope i did'nt miss a step

Hope this helps even one person (running FC3) and BTW this system could run with FC2 (2.6.9 kernel) so I'm now wondering that my black screen was caused by a FC3 kernel + nvidia conflict.
JKS

[666_1337]

I've got an AGP GeForce FX 6800 GT, tested with AGP 8x and 2x, have allways used either mm-patched or vanilla kernels. I didn't ever had an alias in modules.autoload. And still I allways get the blackscreen. I've tested with 2.4.27, 2.6.9, 2.6.10-rc1 and 2.5.9-mm1, and none worked for me.