Help Needed - NomadBSD boots to a completely black screen

Hi, I’m in dire need of assistance with my NomadBSD. I’m a first-time user and I know absolutely nothing at all about BSD and I’m hoping that I can get some suggestions and instructions on how to resolve the issues I’m having getting it to run and boot to a proper GUI.

The problem I am having is NomadBSD seems to just boot to a totally black screen. I have no idea how long it takes for it to get going when I first start it up or what commands I need to enter at the initial start prompt to ensure it starts up correctly.

I managed to kind of solve a problem I was having with it failing to continue booting (NomadBSD would quit with an “Error 2”), but now it gets to a black screen and seems to stop there with no obvious indication that it’s still running or totally crashed. I’ve tried the “fixes” for AMD/ATI GPUs in the handbooklet, but that isn’t working. I am unsure if the issue is due to user error, a corrupted image file or a bad USB thumb drive (though I doubt the drive is at fault since it had a functioning image of Linux Mint Cinnamon 19 on it just prior to me re-flashing it with NomadBSD).

I am trying to run Release 14.1 and my system specs are as follows:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, 8 Cores/16 Threads
Discrete GPU: AMD Radeon 5500M (Navi 14 XTM)
Integrated GPU: AMD Radeon Vega (Renoir Mobile APU)
RAM: 16 GB
Host OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Home 22H2

The type of system is an MSI Bravo 17 laptop, model number A4DDR. I don’t have a separate monitor with HDMI to verify if NomadBSD is actually functioning and I’m simply stuck in external video out mode. I don’t want to just give up on NomadBSD, but I’m at a loss and would really appreciate some expert advice and suggestions. Thank you in advance.

Hi Stephen, and welcome to the NomadBSD community.

My AMD Ryzen7 7840HS with AMD Radeon 780M is somewhat similar, and runs at 144 Hz in NomadBSD.

What does /var/run/dmesg.boot say, what does dmesg | ugrep gpu report to you?

If a terminal is unavailable, try exploring your system by rebooting in a single user mode.

Hi @vladas and thank you.

How do I do that exactly? I tried running NomadBSD both in single user and in multi-user and I get the same thing. Do I just type those commands in at the loader prompt, after selecting option 3 at startup?