nvidia problems - no sli, boots to blank screen

[doctordruidphd]

Two problems have appeared:

1. On bootup, the system goes to a blank/black screen (not actually black, very dark grey). If i hit CTRL-ALT-F1, then CTRL-ALT-F7, I get the kdm greeter (yes I am using kdm) which then works as expected. This problem just appeared within the last 2 days (today is Sunday Oct 14th) after doing daily dist-upgrades, up until then has been working as expected.

2. I have 2 identical (9800 GT) cards in SLI configuration, with appropriate entries in xorg.conf to make it work. I just noticed, upon starting nvidia-settings, that card GPU1 is not being detected; I get only the entry for GPU0. I found an old copy of Lucid and booted it, and it works correctly -- both cards there -- so it's not hardware failure. lspci shows both cards present. glxgears rate is abysmal. I tried booting precise, but unfortunately I had run a dist-upgrade on it yesterday, so it's the same video driver, and the same problem. I tried uninstalling and installing an older version of the NVIDIA driver from the website, but it complains about ABI and won't start, so I can't test that idea. I do not know how long this problem has been present.

I suspect these may be related video driver problems. Anyone else having similar issues?

$ apt-cache policy nvidia-current
nvidia-current:
Installed: 304.51.really.304.43-0ubuntu1

Edit: Installing the most recent version of the NVIDIA driver from their website (304.51) has the same problem - no sli. The downloaded driver DOES fix the bootup screen problem. Anyone else with a similar setup to verify that there's a problem? Thanks.

[adatole]

I just did a fresh (re)-install of Kubuntu 12.10 and I'm experiencing the same thing.

1) system boots to a black screen, but you can tell that things are running
2) if I type my password in anyway, I see the actual Kubuntu boot sequence, and then get a login
3) I haven't tried the Ctrl-Alt-F1, Ctrl-alt-F7 sequence, but I'll do that.

System:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz
32Gb RAM
2 graphics cards: GT218 [GeForce 210], Nvidia
driving 4 monitors

sudo apt-cache policy nvidia-current
nvidia-current:
Installed: 295.40-0ubuntu1.1
Candidate: 295.40-0ubuntu1.1
Version table:
*** 295.40-0ubuntu1.1 0
500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/restricted amd64 Packages
500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-security/restricted amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
295.40-0ubuntu1 0
500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/restricted amd64 Packages

NOTE: Previously this didn't happen, but I had originally installed ubuntu and then added the KDE later. This time I installed Kubuntu fresh.

[doctordruidphd]

2) if I type my password in anyway, I see the actual Kubuntu boot sequence, and then get a login

That's interesting. I tried it, and it didn't work.

Do you have your graphics cards set up for SLI, and are they both being detected? ( take a look at nvidia-settings) You are using an older version of the driver, but still it might be worth checking.

[doctordruidphd]

Update on 15 Oct : Today's dist-upgrade, which included, among other things, updates to grub, ureadahead and upstart, seems to have fixed the problem of booting into a blank screen. The problem of no SLI seems to be more related to the video driver itself.

[capt-zero]

I've been having problems too, every since about a week ago when an update updated my driver to Nvidia 304.51.

[doctordruidphd]

Beginning to look like the SLI problem is hardware related. Will know for sure when the replacement cards get here. The boot-to-bsod problem seems to have been fixed here by recent updates.