Tell me more ×
Ask Ubuntu is a question and answer site for Ubuntu users and developers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 3 down vote favorite

Last night I was trying to make it so my iPod Touch would interface with my Kubuntu machine, and somehow I ended up doing something very, very wrong. Now, whenever the computer starts up, before GRUB even loads, I get a few strange error messages:

[drm] Nouveau - Couldn't find matching output script table.
GPU Lockup

(Those aren't the exact errors, I had to shorthand transcribe the gist). Not only do those errors (and others that are mostly identical) occur, but part of the way through the boot process my screen turns to this (and is afterward useless until the power is hard-reset :/):

What the donkey. :(

Does anybody have any idea as to what I did? I've been trying all day to get anything working using a Xubuntu LiveCD, but to no avail. I even erased all of my data trying to perform a clean install from the disc.

share|improve this question
1  
Your link to a Gmail attachment doesn't work for other people. If it's a screenshot, try editing you question again and upload the screenshot by using the Image button. – ændrük Sep 22 '10 at 18:43
Fixed it, thanks. It's not a screenshot because my computer is useless at the moment, so I had to take one from my phone. – Andy Sep 22 '10 at 19:05
2  
There's something strange in your description: the message you quote is from a Linux driver, so how can it appear before Grub is loaded? Could you describe what happens after you power on the computer? Can you get into the BIOS setup? What is the exact model of your laptop? – Gilles Sep 22 '10 at 20:19
My laptop is the Asus G51J-X2. When I boot the computer, I get the standard message of Hit <f2> for this or <esc> for that. Once that passes, if I have it set to boot from the hard drive, it hangs for a moment and then goes to the screen I posted. – Andy Sep 22 '10 at 21:08
Please edit your question to add your hardware information so it doesn't get buried in the comments. – Jorge Castro Sep 22 '10 at 22:32

closed as too localized by Luis Alvarado♦ Mar 14 at 17:18

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote

Since the computer hangs before Grub is reached, you don't have an Ubuntu problem, you have a hardware or firmware problem. Specifically, the problem is in a component related to your graphics chip, perhaps the chip itself, or its heatsink, or a circuit leading to it, or the memory containing its firmware, or the firmware code itself, or …

If the hosed display wasn't enough of a cue, the error message you quote points to the same component: Nouveau is a driver for NVidia graphics chips, and “GPU lockup” means your graphics processing unit crashed. This error message is coming from Linux, but not from Ubuntu: it's from ExpressGate, which is an appliance Linux distribution available on high-end Asus motherboards.

Try powering off the laptop completely; unplug it and pull out the battery, then wait a couple of minutes and try booting. Another thing that has a tiny but nonzero chance of working is to do a BIOS upgrade (even if it's to a version you already have).

If the fault is in the hardware rather than in the software, there's not much you can do unless you're comfortable tinkering inside laptops (and perhaps not even then). If the computer is still under warranty, have it repaired or exchanged. If you'd like to save your data and erase the disk, take it out and plug it into another computer using a SATA to USB adapter.

share|improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.