1st March 2017, 12:10
Oh what a horrible afternoon & evening. Tower is now dead again, with some symptoms similar to those i've previously documented, but mostly with a brand new way of screwing up. This post is written from Lappy.
During a particularly intensive session with 2 VMs running & one of them attempting a sudo backup operation writing to a destination on my HDD, via a backup pgm i only recently discovered & was testing, Clementine suddenly stopped working. Fearing this might be another one of the freezes beginning, i began closing one by one all my running pgms, preparatory to attempting an orderly reboot [the fact i could actually do all this indicated that this was a different problem; not a freeze]. By the time i had closed most stuff, Maui would not then respond to my desktop-initiated Restart click; at this point it did stop responding to me. I was however able to REISUB.
After the new boot & login, with reference to The Plan i recently listed a few posts ago, i decided i might now launch Driver Manager & change from Nvidia to Nouveau driver. I did so, then rebooted. This is where the new faulty behaviour began. All looked fine til the 1st splashscreen, which itself looked normal but it stayed on screen for longer than normal, then the screen went black except for a blinking cursor. Subsequent reboots gave the same result. Groan.
I changed to tty, edited grub with nano to use nomodeset [knowing this was wrong but short of other ideas], saved updated & rebooted. I was not surprised to find this now caused Tower to hang at the 2nd splashscreen [repeatable]. I re-edited grub to remove that change, saved updated & rebooted, but predictably this only returned to the black screen after 1st splashscreen.
In tty i issued the prime select nvidia command to see what would happen, but it said that command was not known... huh?
Thinking now that my attempt earlier to change from Nvidia to Nouveau had borked all the graphics settings, i decided [in tty] to purge all the nvidia stuff then reinstall it:
The purge was fine, but i was shocked, totally shocked, at the response to the installation attempt. Half a wall of text appeared, proposing to remove multiple lines of files that seemed unrelated entirely to nvidia, & telling me it was also going to install a vast array of new files [many many lines of this]. Buried amongst this was my desired nvidia stuff, but it was swamped by myriad other files... some of the names implied it was trying to install Ubuntu Gnome!! I took some pics with my phone camera, & will post them later if i can upload to Lappy. I did not proceed with the installation. HOW can i make it install ONLY the nvidia stuff, & nothing else?
As if things weren't already bad enough, now it got much worse. I made another stupid decision. Wondering if maybe somehow the nvidia gt610 gpu card had actually failed, but still hoping to avoid having to pull the Tower out from under my desk & take it apart to remove the card, I decided to try booting into BIOS & changing from the default to the integrated intel gpu as the first screen [& i only have one screen], then rebooting. What an idiot. Now, there is no signal at all to my monitor! I can no longer even boot back into BIOS to return that setting to default, because the screen simply receives no signal. Oh my goodness.
Supposing now i had no remaining option but dismantle Tower & remove the nvidia card, in desperate hope that BIOS would then be kind to me, i now have Tower sitting beside me with its side off. I simply cannot deduce HOW to remove the damn card. Once i post this ... post... [before i forget important stuff that's happened, to report here], i'm going to continue trying to understand how to remove it. I removed the/a screw seeming to hold the end of the card to the Tower chassis rear, & i can prise the front of the card out of its socket, but the rear of it stubbornly stays in the socket, fouled i fear by the end metal bracket that screws to the chassis. It seems to need much force, but i'm terrified of breaking something. Grrr.
I might be be wrong but even if i can somehow remove this card, i'm unsure i can run the Tower that way, as the HDMI socket for the monitor's HDMI cable seems to be part of this card's metal end-bracket. --> oh, wait, there seems to be another HDMI socket higher up the chassis rear panel, so maybe that one connects to the integrated Intel gpu...?
This is pretty unpleasant.
During a particularly intensive session with 2 VMs running & one of them attempting a sudo backup operation writing to a destination on my HDD, via a backup pgm i only recently discovered & was testing, Clementine suddenly stopped working. Fearing this might be another one of the freezes beginning, i began closing one by one all my running pgms, preparatory to attempting an orderly reboot [the fact i could actually do all this indicated that this was a different problem; not a freeze]. By the time i had closed most stuff, Maui would not then respond to my desktop-initiated Restart click; at this point it did stop responding to me. I was however able to REISUB.
After the new boot & login, with reference to The Plan i recently listed a few posts ago, i decided i might now launch Driver Manager & change from Nvidia to Nouveau driver. I did so, then rebooted. This is where the new faulty behaviour began. All looked fine til the 1st splashscreen, which itself looked normal but it stayed on screen for longer than normal, then the screen went black except for a blinking cursor. Subsequent reboots gave the same result. Groan.
I changed to tty, edited grub with nano to use nomodeset [knowing this was wrong but short of other ideas], saved updated & rebooted. I was not surprised to find this now caused Tower to hang at the 2nd splashscreen [repeatable]. I re-edited grub to remove that change, saved updated & rebooted, but predictably this only returned to the black screen after 1st splashscreen.
In tty i issued the prime select nvidia command to see what would happen, but it said that command was not known... huh?
Thinking now that my attempt earlier to change from Nvidia to Nouveau had borked all the graphics settings, i decided [in tty] to purge all the nvidia stuff then reinstall it:
Code:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install nvidia-378The purge was fine, but i was shocked, totally shocked, at the response to the installation attempt. Half a wall of text appeared, proposing to remove multiple lines of files that seemed unrelated entirely to nvidia, & telling me it was also going to install a vast array of new files [many many lines of this]. Buried amongst this was my desired nvidia stuff, but it was swamped by myriad other files... some of the names implied it was trying to install Ubuntu Gnome!! I took some pics with my phone camera, & will post them later if i can upload to Lappy. I did not proceed with the installation. HOW can i make it install ONLY the nvidia stuff, & nothing else?
As if things weren't already bad enough, now it got much worse. I made another stupid decision. Wondering if maybe somehow the nvidia gt610 gpu card had actually failed, but still hoping to avoid having to pull the Tower out from under my desk & take it apart to remove the card, I decided to try booting into BIOS & changing from the default to the integrated intel gpu as the first screen [& i only have one screen], then rebooting. What an idiot. Now, there is no signal at all to my monitor! I can no longer even boot back into BIOS to return that setting to default, because the screen simply receives no signal. Oh my goodness.
Supposing now i had no remaining option but dismantle Tower & remove the nvidia card, in desperate hope that BIOS would then be kind to me, i now have Tower sitting beside me with its side off. I simply cannot deduce HOW to remove the damn card. Once i post this ... post... [before i forget important stuff that's happened, to report here], i'm going to continue trying to understand how to remove it. I removed the/a screw seeming to hold the end of the card to the Tower chassis rear, & i can prise the front of the card out of its socket, but the rear of it stubbornly stays in the socket, fouled i fear by the end metal bracket that screws to the chassis. It seems to need much force, but i'm terrified of breaking something. Grrr.
I might be be wrong but even if i can somehow remove this card, i'm unsure i can run the Tower that way, as the HDMI socket for the monitor's HDMI cable seems to be part of this card's metal end-bracket. --> oh, wait, there seems to be another HDMI socket higher up the chassis rear panel, so maybe that one connects to the integrated Intel gpu...?
This is pretty unpleasant.