[DONE] Disaster after upgrade to Mageia 6

[fmolina2b]

Dear all,

I attempted to upgrade my working 5.1 mga to 6 online but ended up with a system which does not start. I try to describe the problem as detailed as I can.

The machine has an MSI 990 FXA mobo with FX-8370 8-core cpu, 16 Gb RAM and a Nvidia GT 610 display card. It has dual boot win 7/mageia via legacy grub (in fact, I am writing this from windows side, which works perfectly, whereas linux does not ...). Locale is spanish.

I started the upgrade and left the system unattended for several hours. Coming back, I found a message box with title "Felicitaciones" (Congratulations) but, below, no text readable, just rows of boxes (like invalid/not found font), including the text in two buttons at bottom. So I closed the box via the top right button. Then I got the mga 6 login prompt, with the correct users, but no password was accepted. Restarting from there, got the grub menu, I selected "Mageia 6 (Cauldron)" (spanish "Caldero", actually). Here, a low res screen with the mageia "cup", and at top the legend "Building nvidia-current driver", then "Installin nvidia-current driver", and after that a black screen forever; there is some disk activity at first, then only rare flashes of the disk led.

This last behavior after the grub menu is the same whenever I choose an older kernel in grub, or press F3 and select safe configurations (or something like that) or if I go to safe mode and type Ctrl-D at the root prompt. Giving the root password I got the console prompt and I am able to go to /var/log and inspect the files there. At this point, I am not sure what to look for, but I found in dmesg the following:

[ 11.326555] NVRM: The NVIDIA GPU 0000:01:00.0 (PCI ID: 10de:104a)
NVRM: installed in this system is not supported by the 375.66
NVRM: NVIDIA Linux driver release. Please see 'Appendix
NVRM: A - Supported NVIDIA GPU Products' in this release's
NVRM: README, available on the Linux driver download page
NVRM: at http://www.nvidia.com.
[ 11.326981] nvidia: probe of 0000:01:00.0 failed with error -1
[ 11.327110] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 249
[ 11.327299] NVRM: The NVIDIA probe routine failed for 1 device(s).
[ 11.327413] NVRM: None of the NVIDIA graphics adapters were initialized!
[

so I suspect that something is wrong with the nvidia driver. But I do not know what to do next. Please help.

Regards,

Fernando

[doktor5000]

Can you please post the output of

Code: Select all

grep -i driver /var/log/Xorg.0.log
lspcidrake -v | grep VGA
rpm -qa|grep nvidia

[fmolina2b]

Thanks doktor5000 for your fast reply. Here are the results:

Code: Select all

grep -i driver /var/log/Xorg.0.log

has empty output because Xorg.0.log has a length of 0 bytes

Code: Select all

lspcidrake -v | grep VGA

results in

Card:NVIDIA GeForce 420 series and later: NVIDIA Corporation|GF119 [GeForce GT 610] [DISPLAY_VGA] (vendor:10de device:104a subv:3842 subd:2615) (rev: a1)

Code: Select all

rpm -qa|grep nvidia

gives:

dkms-nvidia-current-375.66-3.mga6.nonfree
x11-driver-video-nvidia-current-375.66-3.mga6.nonfree
nvidia-current-doc-html-375.66-3.mga6.nonfree

Hope that can be of help.

[doktor5000]

Hmmm, not really sure about this one. According to the README / supported products your card GeForce GT 610 is listed for this driver version: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverRe ... 8290/en-us

You could try to start again drakx11 and select the driver again, and then check whether it still doesn't boot. Otherwise you need to select either the free nouveau driver, or one of the software drivers like vesa or fbdev

[fmolina2b]

Hi,
Unfortunately, none worked. With drakx11, I can select the proprietary nvidia driver, it tests OK, but does not start when rebooting. Nouveau and Vesa drivers do not work - even fail with "server error" when probing. This is so even when the Live KDE DVD uses nouveau and works OK; I also installed it in a spare partition, it works perfectly (checked the driver in Xorg.0.log). Finally, fbdev probes OK but also fails on reboot.

I am wondering, is it possible to reinstall, using the classic DVD, without erasing the software in the old mga5 partition?

Thanks for the help

[doktor5000]

I am wondering, is it possible to reinstall, using the classic DVD, without erasing the software in the old mga5 partition?

Sure, you just need to take care to select the correct partitions to install to.

[fmolina2b]

I try to reinstall selecting upgrade but I get the same error, the installer does not actually rewrite packages. Is there any way to force reinstall of all packages, without reformating the partition?

[doktor5000]

No, you don't want to select upgrade but you need to select install if you want to do an installation, then select existing disks or custom partitioning and choose the existing mga6 partitions for / ( and /home and for other partitions that you may have already )

[fmolina2b]

If I select install in the existing / partition without formatting the same happens: the installer finishes quickly (i.e. it is not actually writing) and the system gets stuck on rebooting as before.
Ok, I will go to a fresh install and then reinstalling other 3rd party software; too much time is taking to recover the old system.

I also attempted to reinstall via urpmi frmm the recovery mode, but it complains that udisksd is not working (or something like that).

By the way, I did some experimenting with live mga 6 installed in another partition. It installed with the nouveau driver. This is the sequence of actions and the results I got:
1. In control center, upgraded display driver to the nvidia one.
2. Couldn't restart in the usual way: clicking restart or shutdown in the app menu resulted in an error message about ksmserver-logout-greeter aborted unexpectedly.
3. Reboot via shutdown command. Going to normal boot, after initial system start, I got a message box (in text mode) saying: "System reboot due to change of graphic card - 30 s to abort" and two options: Accept or Cancel.
3.1. If I choose accept, the system reboots and ends up in the same point of the above mesasge.
3.2. If I choose cancel, continues for a while writing startup log messages to the screen, then gets stuck.
4. If, instead, one chooses recovery mode upon boot, typing Control-D at the root password prompt the sytems starts normally, albeit somewhat slowly. But at every boot I have to do the same if I want to leave the nvidia driver selected.
5. At this point, changing the driver back to nouveau results again in that the system refuses to restart or shutdown from the gui but without any messages!
6. Restarting from the cli, the system now behaves normally, including shutdown/reboot.

With the system which failed upon upgrade from 5.1 to 6, as I said above, selecting install without reformat, and choosing the nouveau driver in the configuration, leads to a quick install and the system hanging upon reboot.
If I go to recovery mode on reboot, enter root password and try to select different drivers with drakx11, the system always hang on reboot.

IMHO, there is some bug related with the nvidia driver, at least for my card and in mga 6; mga 5 worked OK with it. But I cannot figure out waht happened in the online upgrade. I am behind a proxy, could that be the cause of a failed install?

Hope I am not bothering with all that.

[doktor5000]

I also attempted to reinstall via urpmi frmm the recovery mode, but it complains that udisksd is not working (or something like that).

That sounds like you still have the repos enabled which point to your installation media, you might want to remove those.
Please show the output of

Code: Select all

urpmq --list-media active --list-url

[fmolina2b]

Hi doktor5000,
Thanks, but I already reinstalled mga6 from scratch. More or less recovered my basic functionality. I have saved however a copy of the failed upgrade (partition backup, shame I didn't it before the upgrade); if insisting with it may be of some help in the future I could, in some spare time (not soon), retry the upgrade.

[doktor5000]

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [DONE], thanks