fedora 16 wont install, distorted screen during install

jaybot · #1 13th November 2011, 07:13 PM

Never had any problems installing other versions of fedora in the past. 16 wont install for some reason. Tried live cd and the full dvd. Live cd gets right to the end of the boot and then the entire screen fills with colors and freezes. Dvd starts anaconda and then same thing. thinking may have somethng to do with video but i dont have anything fancy, just a nvidia 240. Is there anything i can pass to the advanced install as an option? Any help please?

jaybot · #2 15th November 2011, 01:34 PM

No one else is having this problem?

Carcifier · #3 15th November 2011, 07:34 PM

Might be same problem I have. I did a preupgrade from 15 to 16 and after the reboot anaconda starts and then the system hangs. My screen first came up with garbage on the screen. I read a log that seemed to indicate that Nvidia's proprietary driver was monopolizing the display. So, I UNinstalled it. I tried again and instead of garbage on the screen, I now get a completely blank screen.

I think I'm having a video driver issue, like you probably are.

I don't know how to affect what driver is used during the installer.

I'm using a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 360M video card on a ASUS laptop.

nastycino · #4 15th November 2011, 09:06 PM

Hello, I finally decided to swith from Ubuntu to Fedora. But I can't resolve my installation problems. I might having the same problem as guys before.
Starting up installation of F16 from USB stick, booting to live CD .iso with no problems then I choose option Install to drive and after selecting keyboard layout and drive option screen goes black than comes back few times like that and then freezes on installation screen with inactive buttons back and forward.

I used Ubuntu 10.10 with newest version of syslinux to download iso and Unetbootin to write .iso to USB
my comp is amd apu A6 3650 with integrated Radeon HD, with gigabyte mobo a75m-s2v and SSD OCZ Agility SATA III drive, any idea?
thanks

jaybot · #5 15th November 2011, 09:22 PM

The installer is supposed to use the open source nvidia driver but its not working correctly for some reason on my nvidia 240.

**AdamW** · #6 16th November 2011, 12:16 AM

seems somewhat odd that it works booted live but doesn't work to boot the installer or to boot the system after installing live.

to workaround the issue you can install with vesa - there's a 'basic graphics' option in the bootloader for both the live image and the install DVD. that'll run the installer with vesa and configure the installed system with vesa also. you can then try and install any other driver you want to use.

fusionnrg · #7 16th November 2011, 02:40 AM

I have the exact same problem, but only in 64 bit. 32 bit works just fine but both the 64 bit DVD and live disk fail with video hangups and distrortions. Preupgrade also had distortions on first boot on the 64 bit OS. The DVD will install with the VESA driver but any attempt to configure a new driver results in catastrophic failure. Any help with this would be great even an explanation of whats wrong would be ok with me.

nastycino · #8 16th November 2011, 09:03 AM

Little update on my situation....
so I started installer in a basic graphic mode, everything went smooth, then booted new system and downloaded latest Radeon Hd drivers from AMD, made the file executable and voila, seems to be working ok, just cant come back to Gnome3 for some reason. Anyway after system updates I got a black screen, so probably xorg -fglrx crushing, well uhhh I dont know how many times I did a hard reboot already.....

Carcifier · #9 18th November 2011, 01:41 PM

No one mentioned how to start the "preupgrade installer" with an alternate x driver. I've read info on passing arguments to anaconda etc, but I can't do that with the "preupgrade" install method. I've considered editing the kickstart file, but don't know if that's the way to go, or what I would put in it.

I tried editing the grub entry for the installer kernel, wasn't able to get it to switch off of nouveau. I might have used the wrong syntax.

This is so damn frustrating. I can't believe there isn't any documentation on how to do this. Oh no wait, I can believe that's the case. Sigh.

Magickman · #10 21st November 2011, 04:31 AM

I'm running Fedora 16 86_64 KDE, installed it three days ago on my machine, Asus M5A99X EVO ATX AM3+ AMD 990X 3Gb DDR3 Motherboard.

My screen was really flashy when installing, and after I reboot, it's really flashy, every time you move the mouse. This settled down after I installed the Nvida drivers.

Tonight everything is running fast, and stable.

Carcifier · #11 21st November 2011, 06:39 PM

Mine hangs, never gets to login screen. No input can be delivered to a shell. I cannot make any changes, because I can't get to a prompt.

I wish I knew how to pass arguments to the preupgrade anaconda installer.

**AdamW** · #12 21st November 2011, 10:53 PM

carc: I haven't tried it, but I think you can do it the same way as any other boot method - the second part of preupgrade happens after a reboot, so at that point, you just hit tab when it gets to the boot menu and pass whatever parameters you like to the 'upgrade to fedora 16' entry (or whatever exactly it gets called, I forget). passing 'nomodeset' should be enough to force the anaconda run to fall back to vesa.

Carcifier · #13 22nd November 2011, 10:05 PM

Thank you very much Adam. That was what I needed. I didn't know what parameter to pass. "nomodeset" was what I needed. I passed it along and eventually the installer concluded the upgrade!

However, it was not a smooth process. First, it hung at one point detecting hardware. Then I restarted and it proceeded as if nothing bad had ever happened. As if it was a fluke. The installer installed all the rpms etc.

Then there was a couple issues on the reboot. X seemed to hang. I was able to access virtual consoles, however! I tried to do a update via yum. Yum errored out though. A package had a dependency that was enough to void the full update. I didn't look carefully to see which package was causing the issue initially.

I had read in other threads that "caribou" and SELinux had caused some issues for other people. So, I had yum update the rpm's for them. "Caribou" had a i686 rpm installed, which I had read was a mistake from the installer. It had to be removed by yum, before I added the appropriate 64 bit version. SELinux had 8 rpm's to update.

After I did that, the problem with X still existed.

I examined which package was causing the problem with the yum update. It was "Google Talk Plugin". I didn't need that, uninstalled it. I was then able to do a full update.

After the update, still no X.

It wasn't clicking in my head that was the issue. On my screen I saw the various daemons attempting to start and it appeared it was hanging during one. I didn't think X was the issue.

I poked around and found an error related to nvidia's kernel module. I decided to install nvidia's proprietary driver for the new fedora 16 kernel, which was the 2nd new kernel to be installed.

After I installed the Nvidia kernel module, X started.

Fedora 16 is installed. Thanks!