[GTALUG] Video issue? boot screen has weird mixed lower case/capitals, no X or consoles

[Russell Reiter]

On Mon, May 28, 2018, 2:36 AM Glen Strom via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> I'm running Slackware 14.2, 32-bit. The computer is an HP xw4600 desktop
> workstation. The video card is an Nvidia Quadro NVS 290 PCI Express. I use
> an Nvidia legacy driver (it's an old machine, probably going on 10 years
> old.)
>
> I stepped away from the machine for a while, and when I cam back the
> monitor was fluctuating rapidly and everything was frozen. I had to use the
> Magic System key to reboot.
>
> Upon rebooting, the initial screen had a series of blue vertical lines
> running through it. The lilo screen looked fine. When the OS booted I saw a
> string of numbers followed by a bizarre combination of upper and lower case
> text.
>
> The boot up sequence ran correctly right up until the machine went into
> runlevel 4. The screen stayed dark. I couldn't even switch to a
> console--nothing would show.
>
> I don't have another video card to try.
>
> Does this sound like a video card issue or might it be something else? I
> didn't find anything helpful on searching for an answer.
>

You may have to reset the console if you didn't sync the system with the
magic reboot.

The Raising Elephants acronym is helpful here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Maybe try runlevel 1 and try to reset with #stty sane.



-- 
> Glen Strom
> gstrom57 at gmail.com
> ---
> Talk Mailing List
> talk at gtalug.org
> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20180528/435cb9e6/attachment.html>