graphics card cooked?

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FrankenGraphics
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graphics card cooked?

Post by FrankenGraphics »

My partners' macbook from 2011 has begun having problems and i'm trying to fix it.
It's turning itself off during boot. Hardware utilities don't detect anything. I tested swapping RAM since that was easy, yielding nothing.
I burned lubuntu to a thumb drive and let it boot; it freezes.
Turned off quiet splash to identify where in the process it freezes. It's here:

Code: Select all

fb: switching to radeondrmfb from EFI VGA.
Am i right to assume the graphics card has been cooked?

It has apparently been very hot lately, maybe attributed to playing grim fandango which may or may not run at too high fps these days and cause laptop heat trouble.
lidnariq
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Re: graphics card cooked?

Post by lidnariq »

Standard trick: can you vacuum out the fan?
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: graphics card cooked?

Post by FrankenGraphics »

First, thanks for your help.

The fans have been vacuumed, can't do any harm.

I could get it to boot, finder and all, by entering console, mounting, and exiting. Not really sure what problem it is bypassing when i do it that way, and i haven't made any progress with normal boot, but it's at least a temporary workaround. :shock:
3gengames
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Re: graphics card cooked?

Post by 3gengames »

Try to ssh into the live cd and run dmesg and see what it says. Even without graphics, it'll boot. Give it 2-3 mins or so to pass any failure timeouts and really boot.
Rahsennor
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Re: graphics card cooked?

Post by Rahsennor »

FrankenGraphics wrote:I burned lubuntu to a thumb drive and let it boot; it freezes.
Turned off quiet splash to identify where in the process it freezes. It's here:

Code: Select all

fb: switching to radeondrmfb from EFI VGA.
Linux and AMD graphics don't mix. On the three laptops I've had to debug so far, the open source drivers reliably fail to boot and the binary blobs randomly crash. YMMV.

If you can get it to boot, what happens when you run something CPU-intensive? I once had a cooked CPU that started failing at lower temperatures. Booting would sometimes be enough.
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