Comment 126 for bug 284408

Last weekend I decided to attempt to install the beta driver that Pet linked on 2009-01-23, after seeing that it solved issues for mobility 9700 users.

I was able to successfully install, and after failing to configure dual head correctly, was able to at run startx as root and see a basic grey background and cursor at a fairly high resolution (between 1024x768 and 1400x900). When I decided to go back to runlevel 5 (was previously at run level 3 to test), the gdm login was not able to render correctly and X11 had to be killed w/ ctrl backspace.

At this point I remember seeing some notice that my ext3 file system had been remounted read only due to errors. I ran e2fsck which proceded to move a majority of my filesystem to lost+found, and did not complete successfully several times using the -y or -a flags (it stopped responding for more than an hour on cloning one file w/ multiply claimed inodes). In the end I lost my etc, usr, and sys folders (probably more). Luckily my home directory was left intact, and I backed it up to another partition.

I have attached an error log. As far as I could tell, I was able to load the fglrx beta module and get it to correctly display on my monitor briefly. However, it was not stable and potentially lead to my file system becoming corrupted.

I took this opportunity to install ubuntu 8.04, and I am not upgrading to 8.10 any time soon. Fglrx proprietary drivers work wonderfully in 8.04 LTS, but the xorg 7.4 issue was so frustrating that I was tempted to go out and get an nvidia card (hope you're reading ati). Hopefully new documentation from amd will include specs for the old r300 chipsets, and this will improve 3d and 2d support in the open source drivers significantly.

Some details about my system:

Motherboard: MSI Kt4v-l (ms-6712)
Graphics Card: Tyan 9700Pro
Memory: 3GB pc 2700

Thank you everyone who has been helping out on this issue.