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I have ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 on my HP laptop. A few weeks ago I was confused with a weird trouble in proprietary drivers for my graphics card. When I start X server (or just boot Windows) system sometimes totally hangs up with black screen. The most annoying thing is that issue appearing is absolutely random (2 success, 3 fails, 1 success, 7 fails, etc.). It appears both on Linux (Arch, Debian 7) and Windows XP. I've tried reinstalling OS, drivers, etc. I've also tried updating BIOS. Then boot was successful for the next few times and issue appeared again (probably it was just a coincidence, because another BIOS updates gave no results). I really don't know what to do. Any ideas?
Oleg
Posted 2013-06-28T21:29:22.010
Reputation: 11
1Sounds like hardware failure. – Ramhound – 2013-06-28T22:29:02.650
is it possible your trying to attribute it to the video , video card and driver, when it could be something else? Like a memory setting, or a PCI(&E) clock rate setting , or other possible hardware things. Being less likely that it is software things when having the same problem in both systems. Does the bios allow for any changes to be made to such settings? With SOME laptops it could even be related to the quality of the battery, when the battery provides suplimental power in high power use times. – Psycogeek – 2013-06-29T07:32:59.647
Are all the fans spinning up normally, is the air flow good still, is it possible that it is in dire need of cleaning? is it possible that the thermal paste might be a dried up hunk of uselessness :-) – Psycogeek – 2013-06-29T07:39:00.407
Yes, I also think this is some kind of hardware failure or BIOS. But since I did not make any changes in BIOS, it is quite likely, that this is still something in hardware. I've tried before to turn it on without battery, but uselessly. I also disassembled laptop and cleaned up everything I can get. – Oleg – 2013-06-30T08:06:15.720
Well, I understand that there is no nice way to fix it alone (I am software engineer, not hardware). But maybe there is some kind of workaround? Please post it, if you know. Also, that's what I found in X.org.log: [ 36.974] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:17:0) found [ 36.974] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:0) found < like this about 10 times > – Oleg – 2013-06-30T08:16:57.417