Lost my display

[eric.s]

I was trying to get dual-head mode to work and changed one of the diplay resolutions and now when I boot, I have no dispaly. How can I get it to boot to the cli and then, reset my display resolution?

Thnax!

-eric.

[johnnymack]

Hey eric,

Thats aggravating isn't it? I've done that before too.

Well, here is a suggested way out for you:

1. once booted up and the display is either black-on-black, or showing skewed colors at a diagonal, or just text-mode errors.. change to a clean text-mode tty by pressing <Ctl><Alt><F2> and a new login should appear.

2. login and, go back over to /etc/X11 and edit the file "xorg.conf" to fix your mistake and save the file.

3. go back to the fouled up graphical screen via <Ctl><Alt><F7> and attempt to restart it by pressing <Ctl><Alt><Bksp>. If that resets the graphical mode and puts up a graphical login screen, you are done.

4. If the <Ctl><Alt><Bksp> has no corrective effect, you may have to reboot.

5. In the future, practise defensive programming by making a backup copy of the file BEFORE editing and changing it. Also, select more that one graphical resolution so that if one is bad, you can simply cycle on to the next one by pressing <Ctl><Alt><+> or <Ctl><Alt><->
In xorg.conf in the "Section screen" use a Modes line like this:

SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection

That way, if 1600x1200 fails at startup, by cycling forward, you can get the X server to try mode 1280x1024 and so on.

HTH

jm

[eric.s]

Jim,

Thanks for all of the info. <CTRL><ALT><F2> did nothing, unfortunately. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I'm using Fedora 7, with kernel 2.6.22.1-41.fc7. I have a presentation to do today, so it's rebuild time.

I do appreciate the effort.

-Eric.

[blitzo]

I had this happen when I was doing a presentation on a projector and tried to use the display tool to clone my screen onto the projector. I could not get to a console. What I had to do was boot into a livecd and remove my xorg config. You can do this by typing

mv _/etc/X11/xorg.conf _/etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

That will rename your current config to .bak. You should then be able to boot into X and it will create a default config. Do get into a a live enviroment use a Fedora live cd it should automatically mount your root drive which should be labeled as _/ it may be different depending on your system. You also might have to manually mount the partition.

If any one has an answer can you boot into run level 3 from the grub menu?

[Magnar]

Originally Posted by blitzo

If any one has an answer can you boot into run level 3 from the grub menu?

You can press 'a' at the menu to edit the "kernel line", and add '3' the appropriate place (at the end, maybe?).