[ale] Best way to get dual display working (take 2k)

[Scott Castaline]

On 01/06/2011 12:35 AM, Greg Clifton wrote:
> Yeah, a live CD boot takes lots longer than a "boot & install" cause 
> you're actually installing pretty much the whole OS to a RAM disk 
> rather than just an installer program, right? FWIW, I remember reading 
> maybe a year or two ago that ASUS was making Gigabyte's boards (at 
> least some of them). Seems all mobo manufacturers have bad batches 
> from time to time, but Asus and Gigabyte are in the top 5 to 8 
> manufacturers in my book. On the video card issue, all modern graphics 
> cards are actually [at least] two cards in one, the basic VGA for boot 
> purposes and the high end GPU chip/circuit with lots of memory that 
> doesn't come into play until the drivers are loaded. So while not 
> common, still possible to have the VGA part good but some of the 
> memory or other circuitry of the GPU hosed. I always prefer to grab a 
> new video card out of the anti-static bag by the mounting bracket 
> which is attached to the ground plane of the board and then touch the 
> power supply in the computer with my other hand (while still holding 
> the graphics card) to equalize the charge. Of course, it should go 
> without saying that you should unplug the power cord to your power 
> supply before you install the new card, but I have been known to 
> forget about the 5V standby power.
> GC
Ok, so late last night I went ahead and dragged out my "old" HD 3650 
PCIe x16 card and went through the process with that one. I had not done 
that at first since my intent was to use the "better" or newer video 
controller as my primary and connect the TV to the 3650 card. Results 
were the same.

This morning I tried moving the card to the 2nd slot which is PCIe x8 
with this chipset and got the same results, no joy. I then tried 
resetting the BIOS to defaults (which by the way I found interesting 
that it sets the primary video source to the PCI slots not the onboard 
chip, not even one of the PCIe slots) and got essentially the same results.

It seems to intermittently fail 2 different ways, going back and forth.

boot device found

boot device found

boot has failed, sleeping forever

Googling this showed mostly F 12 and some F14 and in all cases "root 
device" was not found (something like that, don't remember the exact 
wording) was stated instead of "boot device found".

The other way it fails is;

[2.0269701] general protection fault 0000[#1] SMP
                      last sysfs file: /sys/bus/pci/drivers/radeon/uevent
. a whole bunch of stuff
. scrolled off the screen
. paused at this point
                      worker 147 failed while handling '/devices/pci 
0000:00/2222:00:03.010000 - fast scrolling started again so was not able 
to get rest of line

I also got once;
[.6182001] Fixing recursive fault but reboot is needed

These errors occurred attempting to boot from the hard drive as well as 
LiveCDs and Install DVDs. I had even tried going back to F12 which 
didn't even get started, probably because of hardware being too new for 
that version, but decided to try it anyway.

So I'm not sure which direction I need to go with this. Any suggestions? 
Am I missing something, or overlooking something?