Fedora 41 hanging at boot after changing graphics card, trouble reinstalling

Let me start with the issue, then what happened before it started, then what I’ve done to try and fix it.

Issue:
Fedora 41 has started hanging at boot. After pressing esc when the 3 dots appear, I can see it’s doing system checks and eventually it just dumps be back to a screen with nothing but a blinking cursor and it will sit there forever. I’m assuming the problem is that the Nvidia drivers for my graphics card are no longer installed (see section below for why) but it’s just an assumption.

Occurrences prior to Issue:
I’ll summarize this quickly.

  • Was running Fedora 41 with an Nvidia card.
  • Upgraded graphics card to an AMD card.
  • AMD card was not running properly. As part of troubleshooting, completely expunged Nvidia drivers.
  • After consulting tech support for the graphics card issues, the card is faulty and needs to be replaced. So I swapped back to the previous Nvidia card.
  • While the case was open, I performed a few other upgrade/maintenance tasks that involved reseating both the CPU and all the memory sticks. (I took pains to reinstall the sticks in the exact same slots I removed them from, just in case that matters.)
  • Boot system, encounter issue as stated above.

Corrective attempts:
The only thing I can think to do is re-install Fedora. I was hoping to be able to do a sort of “repair” install where it installs all the packages and such but doesn’t reformat the drive. (A post in the Fedora subreddit indicated this was possible.) I created a Fedora 41 live USB drive and booted into it. However, when trying to install onto the same drive that Fedora is currently installed on, it seems to think there’s only 1MB left of space and refuses to install without me first manually deleting all the partitions. Pretty much everything important is backed up (… pretty much) so if that’s what I have to do, fine, but I figured I’d ask for help/other options before nuking from orbit.

Let me know if you need any other details to help me troubleshoot.

1 Like

Did you have a graphical login screen that had worked (from Gnome?)
Can you, when the system hangs, press Ctrl Alt F2 to go to a new console and login there? If you can, perhaps you can reinstall the Nvidia drivers from there.

Having previously had the nvidia drivers installed (at least from rpmfusion) means there probably were entries in the kernel command line that disabled the nouveau drivers. If the nvidia drivers were removed, including the fall back service, then the system will not load the nouveau drivers and there will be no drivers for the GPU loaded.

During boot when the grub menu is displayed (you can force display by holding the shift key just after the bios splash screen disappears) press the e key then look at the listing seen.
If you see rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau in that display remove it then continue booting and the system should now display properly with the other driver.

If those entries are not there then it seems something else.

I had no idea about that little trick to launch a console there - that’s what I was trying to accomplish with the live drive! Thanks for that. I installed the Nvidia drivers from that console and then the system booted up as normal. I diagnosed the problem correctly, at least :slight_smile:

1 Like

Another black magic keystroke I can use for future diagnosis - thank you.