Stuck on boot after AMD driver update

Question

I've read tons of forums today and none are able to work out for me, therefor I start my own question. Yesterday steam gave me so opengl errors, so after a bit of research I found out I had to update my amd graphic cards. So i downloaded the amd drivers and installed it, and now when i want to start ubuntu, im stuck at the purple screen with ubuntu and the 5 dots.

I tried all sorts of commands in the recovery mode, going from purging fglrx to installing fglrx , but I keep getting errors in return. I'm really novice at all of this, but as far as I can see at the errors which I receive when I try to install fglrx, is that it seems that it cannot install fglrx-core. OFcourse, this is just what I think.

I'd really like like some of which commands I can/should run to fix this. I am running ubuntu 14.10.

Thanks

Answer 1

Try to go back to the original version of your driver by following these steps:

1. When your computer boots press F8 or F10 depending your boot options so you can display Ubuntu's advanced boot options.
2. Choose the recovery option for your latest kernel version
3. Choose failsafeX in the list and confirm Yes
4. Now in the same menu choose the resume option

Ubuntu will start ONCE in this mode with Kernel graphic drivers (aka Gallium). When you login go to Additional drivers, uninstall your current driver and re-enable it again.

Restart your computer once done, this should solve your boot issue.

Answer 2

I almost solved every boot issue i had with following uninstallation and reinstallation on AMD website:

1- Uninstall The Driver

sudo aticonfig --uninstall

if this makes errors use this:

sudo sh /usr/share/ati/amd-uninstall.sh

if you also got an error from this then try to force

sudo sh /usr/share/ati/amd-uninstall.sh --force

2- Reinstalling X.org driver

In order to restore the system to the previous state before the last installation, the original configuration file needs to be restored manually. Without that, Xorg may fail to start properly after uninstalling the driver and rebooting the system. To restore the original Xorg configuration file: Locate backup configuration files:

ls /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original-* 

Take the latest version with the highest number and copy it over the existing xorg.conf file:

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original-<number> /etc/X11/xorg.conf

After that, it should be safe to reboot the system and start up using the open-source driver that ships with the OS. Reboot your system.

sudo reboot

3- You should get a usable GUI.

If you reached this point then you have 2 choices.a- install proprietary from amd website b- install proprietary from additional drivers.

Visit this for more info.

Answer 3

After you are in the command line interface (i.e. following the steps as stated by addictcook below choosing failsafeX login option) you can just directly run

sudo aticonfig --uninstall

However, the above command will fail to uninstall the AMD driver if you have installed it with the .deb packages, which was the case for me. So I had to run

sudo dpkg -r fglrx-dev fglrx-amdcccle fglrx

(that command line interface indeed will advice on the above command)

and then reboot the machine with sudo reboot