I recently completed a substantial hardware upgrade, shifting from a Dell XPS with a 3060 Ti to a brand new setup featuring an AMD R7 9800X3D and a 5080. I reused my old NVMe SSD because my new drive hasn't arrived yet. However, I'm stuck at a black screen with a blinking underscore (_). I attempted booting to the TTY by modifying the GRUB entry for CachyOS, but SDDM won't load. I suspect it may be related to either the kernel or the GPU driver, but I'm unsure how to troubleshoot this situation. In the meantime, I'm backing up everything on an external drive just in case I need to do a complete reinstall.
5 Answers
With a flashing underscore, you might want to try booting with the **nomodeset** option. It can help you access a failsafe graphics mode if there’s a conflict.
Honestly, doing a clean install is probably the best route. Backup your important files, then reinstall the OS. Trying to carry over your old OS to a new build can typically lead to these kinds of headaches.
I understand the reasoning, but I'm hoping there's a way to get the old setup working before I wipe everything.
Make sure to mention your distro and some hardware details next time, it helps in getting accurate advice! But for now, have you tried switching to a different output for your monitor? Sometimes that can do the trick.
I haven't tried switching to the mobo output yet, but I'll do that when the backup is done.
Are you attempting to reuse your current operating system install or starting fresh? If you have another computer, it might be worth plugging the SSD into that for troubleshooting. Let me know how that goes!
Yeah, my old PC is still operational. I can try connecting the SSD back to it once my backup is complete. Thanks!
No problem! Just taking a look at what’s going on in the old setup could help a lot.
If you're comfortable with it, I suggest trying to chroot into your system from a live USB. You might want to remove any Intel microcode if it’s still there and install the AMD version instead. Rebuilding the initramfs could also help. It’s surprising you’re having issues since your new components aren't drastically different from the old setup.
Yeah, I didn’t think I’d run into this much trouble either! I did install the AMD microcode recently, but the Intel one is still present. I also rebuilt the initramfs.
The underscore isn’t flashing, just static. The nomodeset option didn’t work on the OS, but I need to use a legacy version to boot the Cachy live ISO to avoid the same issue.