As stated in the title I am relatively new to Linux and definitely new to the forum so I hope I don’t break any guidelines by posting here. I only ever installed a Linux distro on a single hard drive pc so my current problem came to be. I installed Linux Mint 19 (cinnamon) 64bit on my current laptop. This laptop has an 80GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, so I followed the easy installation guide. The problem came when I started installing a few games and my SSD filled up really fast, so I tried to install the games on a different on the hard drive and got really confused as to how to get that working. Out of frustration, I decided to reinstall Mint but this time on the hard drive with custom installation. I formatted the SSD and made the relevant partitions on the HDD, this all went well but on reboot, I only got a black screen with a flickering dash.
I hope you would be able to help an idiot trying to figure out where he went wrong. If possible I would like to make my laptop operate normally again and boot from the SSD and install programs on the HDD.
Here are the specifications of the laptop if needed:
Medion Erazer x682X
Intel core i7-3610QM @2.30GHZ
16GB DDR3
80GB SSD + 1TB HDD
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 670M
My thanks and sorry for any bad English,
Jan Thomas
Congratulations on switching to GNU/Linux! You’ve now moved into the dark side of the force… which is the bright side of the force, in this case!
Ah, yes! Is this the black screen with a single white cursor blinking on the top left corner? If so, and this has happened to me numerous times with Antergos, Manjaro and a variety of other distros, then this is likely an issue with the NVIDIA drivers. I am guessing you chose to install the drivers from the graphical interface with the provided for tool? On Antergos it used to be the case (at least until 6 months back) that the in-built tool would fetch older versions of the driver. The workaround that worked for me every time, and I now do this for all my installations on all distros, is:
Now, this all may seem overwhelming at first, but it’s really deceptively simple.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for you.
Switch to non-GUI tty1
Ctrl+alt+F1
Remove existing drivers.
sudo service xfwm4 stop
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
Blacklist Nouveau
sudo bash -c "echo blacklist nouveau > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf"
sudo bash -c "echo options nouveau modeset=0 >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf
Confirm with modprobe:
cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf
blacklist nouveau
If the above fix doesn’t work, perhaps this will be of help.
Since you’re using cinnamon and have lightdm as your login manager, you’ll might need to reinstall it to get everything going.
First off, when you get the flashing cursor, try CTRL+ALT+F8 or CTRL+ALT+F9 rather than F1. That should get you to a terminal prompt screen. (I find on different distros I sometimes have to use other F keys to get a prompt. )
From there, you’ll want to uninstall and reinstall your login manager.
Login in from the terminal prompt as root then try these commands:
Thank you so much for the fast reply. It is not a cursor but an underscore like you could start writing something. Helas the pc does not react to any keyboard command so pressing ctrl + alt + F1 (F8 or F9) does nothing for me.
I do not get the Grub manager. After the bios screen it directly loads that black screen, could it be that some way or another introduced a fault there ?
The Medion laptops have UEFI enabled normally. You can hit F2 to get into BIOS to verify. You may have to press it repeatedly on boot in case you have fast boot enabled.
Sorry for double posting, but it all works now so thank you very much for all the help. If possible could you explain how I would go about installing programs the “windows way” where I can choose a folder on the 1TB HDD for example ? I have currently left this as unallocated space.
I hope it is possible since this was the original reason I got into this problem.
You’re not going to install programs the windows way. Most likely anything you install will be through the package manager, which will install files to predetermined locations based on file type. Linux isn’t like Windows, programs aren’t installed to individual folders.
You could use the HDD as a Steam game folder if you wish.
Wine would install to ssd, but you can choose where to install the wine environment, which usually would be in your home folder. But you can install the environment to the HDD.
Could you please leave a note on “How” you ended up with a working computer (driver reinstall, GRUB fix, complete reinstall)? This is helpful as often novice users, i.e. Level 1 ;-), tend to come to forums looking not so much for deep system understanding as they do for “hacks” to get a stable working machine! I know because I used to be one of them. As Wendell says, “We were all Level 1 at some point!”. It’s helpful to just have a “1 2 3 FIXED!” guide sometimes!
Do some reading on the fstab file and how to add a drive to your Linux system. You can mount your spinning rust drive somewhere in /home, or you can mount it in one of the more customary locations and set up a symbolic link to it. This is “The Linux Way.”