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[ied206]

[Note : Due to E-Mail Encoding, Original Subjet was corrupted]
- rEFInd 0.8.6 Black Screen Report

I updated rEFInd (on ThinkPad S440) from 0.8.4 to 0.8.6 weeks ago. For days, it worked well. However, in one day, black screen started to appear (and still appear)
Since 0.8.5, it is showing me just black screen. However, 0.8.4 works well.

I 'guess' the only change I had made was repatitioning my hard disk.
(I cannot recall exactly I did it after upgrading rEFInd to 0.8.6, but this is the no other change I made)

My paritions were configured like this
- /dev/sda : GPT, 256GB SSD (EFI, MSR, Windows(NTFS), Linux_Root(ext4), Linux_Swap(ext4), Linux_Home(ext4))
- /dev/sdb : GPT, 1TB HDD (EFI, MSR, Windows2(NTFS), NTFS, NTFS)

And I changed into
- /dev/sda : Unchanged
- /dev/sdb : GPT, 1TB HDD (EFI (Formatted), MSR, Linux2_Root(ext4), Linux2_Home(ext4), NTFS, NTFS)

I configure refind.conf to use custom background and resolution.

Banner Wallpaper.png
resolution 1600 900

To solve black screen, I tried these.
- Use default refind.conf : Success
- Use default background with custom resolution : Fail
- Use ThinkPad EFI's default resolution, 640 480 (Did not set 'resolution' option) : Success
- Rollback to 0.8.5 : Fail
- Upgrade to 0.8.7 : Fail
- Rollback to 0.8.4, with custom resolution : Success

So I think resolution is the direct cause, but I could not track the details.

[Roderick W. Smith]

Based on your testing, I agree that you're having problems with resolution changes. In the case of most laptops, there's no need to set a custom resolution, since rEFInd will come up with the optimum resolution by default. If you set an unsupported resolution, rEFInd should pop up a message stating what resolutions are supported, which will then disappear when you press a key. It's conceivable that this is what's happening to you, but that the message is hidden for some reason. If so, you should see the menu appear after you hit a key.

As to why setting the resolution worked with 0.8.4 but not with subsequent versions, I have no explanation. I don't recall making any changes to the way rEFInd sets the screen resolution in recent versions. Looking over the change logs, the only changes that are even remotely related deal with keyboard handling. You can try this version, which reverts those changes:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind-bin-0.8.7.1.zip

If that doesn't solve it, then my best guess is that one part of the code is damaging another part's data through some memory mismanagement. This could be very difficult for me to track down and fix, since I don't have access to your hardware. It might help if I knew what the default resolution is and to what value you're setting it, though.

[cheitkamp]

Hello,

I have the same problem:
My computer crashes, as soon as the screen mode is changed.
The crash happenens if the mode is changed from EFI shell, too.

It doesn't crash anymore if I delete the ntfs driver from the drivers_x64 folder.

I'm using a Thinkpad T520.

[ied206]

Thank you for response.

My ThinkPad S440's default EFI resolution is 640x480, and its LCD resolution is 1600x900. So I strech EFI resolution to 1600x900 using rEFInd. Of course, there was no pop-up message.

When rEFInd (>=0.8.5) freezed in my laptop, it hanged with no pop-up message, and I could not boot into Windows nor Linux.

However, recently I sorted my HDD's GPT Table with gdisk (s), then I found all version (0.8.4, 0.8.6, 0.8.7.1) of rEFInd is working well. No black screen, no freeze. (So it may not be related to keyboard handling, but partition order and format.)

• Before Sort
  $ gdisk /dev/sda -> p
  
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 657407 320.0 MiB EF00 EFI system partition
2 657408 919551 128.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved part
3 919552 84805631 40.0 GiB 8300
6 84805632 274155519 90.3 GiB 8300
4 274155520 1113835519 400.4 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
5 1113835520 1953523711 400.4 GiB 0700 Basic data partition


• After Sort
  $ gdisk /dev/sda -> p
  
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 657407 320.0 MiB EF00 EFI system partition
2 657408 919551 128.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved part
3 919552 84805631 40.0 GiB 8300
4 84805632 274155519 90.3 GiB 8300
5 274155520 1113835519 400.4 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
6 1113835520 1953523711 400.4 GiB 0700 Basic data partition


Have similar partition issues been reported recently?

[Roderick W. Smith]

ied206, please check cheitkamp's response. Are you by any chance using the NTFS driver? It's very odd that a filesystem driver would interact with the video mode in this way -- but I've heard of stranger things!

[ied206]

I checked my rEFInd installation, and all default x64 file system drivers (btrfs, ext2, ext4, hfs, iso9660, ntfs, reiserfs) were installed.