Driver Problem

[MTK]

I decided to try ATI again with the built-in drivers. When I tried the radeonhd driver, the computer goes into a black screen after loading and printing something about "rt_ioctl_giwscan" every minuter or so in an infinite loop. How can I get my computer back?

[Rubberman]

You can try to boot into runlevel 3 (no gui) or boot a recovery/live CD and mount the root file system. Then, edit xorg.conf and change the driver. If booted into RL3 it's /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If booted by CD and the root file system is mounted on (for example) /mnt/sysdir then it would be /mnt/sysdir/etc/X11/xorg.conf. FWIW, you can use "vesa" for the driver - that's the generic "works on all hardware" video driver. It won't support 3d or hardware acceleration, and it won't run full-motion video very well, but it will give you a GUI with which you can fix your system.

[MTK]

But I need a text edtior to make it boot in runlevel 3. I can't even get a terminal!

What happens is:

1. BIOS Screen
2. GRUB Screen
3. Fedora Loading Bar
4. In an infinite loop displaying strange messages

How do I get a terminal?

[Rubberman]

At the Grub screen, press (I think) the Esc key to get the grub menu where you can input options for booting the kernel. I think the option for runlevel 3 would be "runlevel=3", but I'm not 100% sure of that.

[MTK]

I got the GRUB screen and here is what it looks like. It does not say anything about ESC.

[Rubberman]

I think you want the option to modify the kernel arguments before booting.

[MTK]

In that case, I pressed "a" and I get this screen:

[Rubberman]

As I said, try adding runlevel=3 to the line (with a space between it and the existing last argument).

[MTK]

I got a terminal, deleted xorg.conf (Fedora didn't have it originally, nVidia put it there), and now everything works fine.

[Rubberman]

Yes. When xorg doesn't find an xorg.conf file, it will interrogate the hardware and determine what it should use and how to configure the X server. At least the latest versions will do that.