Blank screen when booting from USB

General Discussion
1

Trying to boot clear-32270-live-desktop from a USB drive I get the following errors:

2020-02-09 09.50.51
2020-02-09 09.50.511281×720 325 KB

and then I end up with a blank screen, no cursor, no reaction to any keyboard combination (Alt+F2, Ctrl+Alt+F3, Ctrl+Alt+F5,), and the monitor switching on and off indefinitely.

Ctrl+Alt+Del alone does not do anything but if I first press Ctrl+Alt+F3 and then Ctrl+Alt+Canc the system reboots as expected.

Not sure which one of the following two errors is the incriminating one:

ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Could not resolve symbol ... AE_NOT_FOUND
[...]
nvidiafb: cannot request PCI regions

Adding acpi_osi=!, or noapic acpi=off, or systemd.unit=multi-user.target to kernel parameters during boot did not change anything.

Adding module_blacklist=nouveau I could log in from a terminal.

modprobe.blacklist=nvidiafb gets rid the nvidiafb error but does not solve the problem.

In the BIOS: both secure boot and fast boot are disabled. I could not find a AHCI/IDE mode in BIOS to set on or off: closest thing was a XHCI Hand-off which enabled or disabled didn’t make any difference.

Can anyone suggest anything else I can try to be able to boot into Clear Linux GUI?

My hardware:

  • One monitor Samsung C32HG70
  • GeForce GTX 970: MSI Gaming 4G, 4GB
  • MSI H170 Gaming M3 (with the latest BIOS 7978vCC)
  • Intel Core i7-6700 @ 3.40GHz
  • RAM 2x8GB Kingston DDR4 @ 2133MHz
  • SSD 960 EVO, 500 GB, M.2, NVMe

Other resources:

2

Likely the cause of your issues. Check the other NVIDIA related threads on this forum on how to deal (or not) with that.

3

Thanks, I suspected that, had other kinds of problems in the past on other computers with Nvidia cards with other Linux distributions. I decided for sure my next graphic card will not be an Nvidia one.

I have given another try with the kernel parameters pci=noacpi nouveau.modeset=0 with no luck, ended up with this screen:

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4

The desktop installer doesn’t support Nvidia hardware out the box. Here is how to make it work.

First, boot the live-server installer media, press ‘e’ to edit the command line and add: modprobe.blacklist=nouveau to the end of the command line.

Install Clear using the ncurses-based installer.

When your system reboots, you’ll have to edit the command line again by pressing e at boot, and adding modprobe.blacklist=nouveau to the command line.

Then, make the modprobe change permanent using clr-boot-manager:

echo "modprobe.blacklist=nouveau" > /etc/kernel/cmdline.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf 
sudo clr-boot-manager update

Next, install the NVIDIA drivers. I used the scripts found here to automate that process: awesome-clear-linux/NVIDIA-Driver at master · lebensterben/awesome-clear-linux · GitHub
If you would prefer to configure the drivers manually, this article can help you:
https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/tutorials/nvidia.html

After those steps, you should be able to install and run the desktop:

sudo swupd bundle-add desktop-autostart

Hope this helps!

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