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black screen on startup

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macmee
Posts: 1
Joined: 2019-01-20 07:42

black screen on startup

#1 Post by macmee »

Hey guys, my specs are:

Alienware X51 R3
Intel Core i7 6700 3.40GHz Skylake
PNY Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 / Intel HD Graphics 530
RAM 8GB
Sound: Realtek ALC898
Realtek RTL8168/8111 gigabit Ethernet Adapter / Intel dual band Wireless AC 7265

I just installed debian 9 along side windows 10 (I shrank the W10 partition and installed debian with no issues on the free space). I selected both the debian desktop manager and GNOME during installation. I can boot into grub just fine, and it shows both debian and windows. When I choose debian though, I very briefly see some text fly by on my screen and then I just end up on a totally black screen (no cursor or anything, monitor is on just everything is black).

My GUESS is it's because I have a nvidia GPU and maybe need to install a driver or do something around that? My system also has an iGPU however I cannot access it nor disable it from the bios. So I can only use the GTX 970. Both DVI and HDMI through this GPU produce the same problem as described above.

Does anyone have any ideas on what might be wrong?

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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: black screen on startup

#2 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Have you tried disabling modesetting?

Your hardware is too new for stretch anyway, you need a newer kernel and graphics stack from the backports repository.

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=139003

Search through forum member @stevepusser's posts for more detail on this, I'm sure he doesn't want to type it all in again :)
deadbang

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stevepusser
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Re: black screen on startup

#3 Post by stevepusser »

I believe that Skylake hardware like this just made it into getting supported by Stretch, though you do need firmware-misc-nonfree for full support.

Dell Optimus laptops of the same Skylake vintage also need the nouveau driver blacklisted at boot or suffer the black screen of despair. Dell owns Alienware, so chances are the solution is the same.

Shoot, we just had a thread last week on the MX forums where the OP had the exact same problem. They had already found the nouveau solution themself, but were getting a lockup after installing the Nvidia drivers for Bumblebee, which required yet another boot cheat, this one from the Debian Bumblebee wiki. Let's see if I can find it--we are getting so much traffic now with both beginners and distro switchers.

OK, I found it. The boot command you can try adding is modprobe.blacklist=nouveau You don't need this after installing bumblebee-nvidia, since that also blacklists nouveau, but it doesn't hurt to leave it. Here's the MX thread, with some of our false leads: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?f=107&t=47725
MX Linux packager and developer

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