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.