Black screen on startx, weird intermittent behaviour

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Hello, I’m experiencing problems right after a big system update.

I have a Manjaro installation using KDE and kernel 5.15. My video card is a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070.

Everything has worked flawlessly for a year now. I have updated the kernel only when a new LTS version was available.

Today, after a big update, when rebooting the machine I got a black screen and couldn’t even get to the login screen. I cannot change tty using CTRL+ALT+Fx

I booted using runlevel 3 and first tried to install kernel version 5.19. I managed to boot without a problem and rebooted the system to see if 5.15 was still not working. To my surprise, on successive boots, not 5.15 nor 5.19 work now.

In one of my attempts, I booted on runlevel 3 and tried startx manually. This time, after a few seconds it gave up and threw a “Fatal server error: no screens found”. I have done the same thing several times, but every other time it just froze everything.

I have tried to reinstall the video drivers with mhwd without any success. I would post my /var/log/Xorg.0.log, but I don’t know how to get the log for the last boot attempt.

I don’t know what much else to say, I’ve tried several reinstall sequences that I have found around the forum but honestly, I’ve lost track. I will provide any log and command output that you tell me, but I really don’t know where to start.

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Hi @javierbg, and welcome!

Possibly related to:

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Thank you so much @Mirdarthos ! That was exactly it. I suppose the video-nvidia package got updated and the bug appeared. The system is running again perfectly with kernel 5.15 (I prefer to stay on LTS).

For anyone experiencing the same error, you have to uninstall the video-nvidia driver and install the video-nvidia-470xx driver. For that you need to access the terminal, but because video doesn’t work you are going to need to access it without a GUI. I had to change the boot runlevel to 3, as explained in this guide: (it doesn’t let me share the link even though it its from this same forum. Search for “howto resolve an unbootable manjaro”). Then login and run the commands:

sudo mhwd -r pci video-nvidia
sudo mhwd -i pci video-nvidia-470xx

I don’t use Manjaro for anything graphics heavy and the 470xx driver was working fine, so I guess I’ll leave it at that, but I hope this problem gets solved in the future and people can just use the latest video-nvidia driver.

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