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I installed ubuntu 11.04 to a USB hard drive with multiple GPUs.

The installation went great. The os booted up, but there were some obvious gui/visual problems with the memory clock being so low on all of the cards (150mhz minimum).

I took out the first GPU, flashed it back to stock BIOS, popped it back into the rig and upon booting I was met with a black screen filled with lots of errors about "radeon"... "ati"... things like that... So I can only assume that changing the BIOS on the card caused the problem.

Any reason for this? How does LinuxCoin boot up no matter what/how many GPUs are installed?

I am currently re-installing Ubuntu onto the flash drive with a stock BIOS for card #1 and underclocked memory BIOSes for all the rest.

I would like to be able to seamlessly change video cards however as I upgrade my rig.

Afaik you need to delete xorg.conf & rerun --initial --adapter=all whenever you change arrangement of the cards, imo because every card busid is different every time you  arrange it, take a look at xorg.conf "Section "Devices"".

First of all if your Ubuntu doesn't boot hold shift while booting, you'll see a kernel selection menu. Select rescure mode and then select safe Xorg. After that run aticonfig as foxmulder suggested. No need to delete xorg.conf though, it should be replaced by aticonfig.

Is there any way to simply run aticonfig --initial --adapter=all before the desktop loads or something on every boot? Huge linux noob here!

Is /etc/init.d/rc.local what I need?

If I simply remove the "new" card and boot up the rig everything works fine.

But then of course I can't initialize the new card since it's not plugged in :S

I will try your method of pressing shift while booting. Thanks for the input!

EDIT: I tried pressing shift while booting, got the kernel selection menu, selected recovery mode, and waited a minute or two for it to show me some options in a drop down menu.

Now I am looking at about 5 options. The one most closely related to xorg/video configuration seems to be "Run in failsafeX graphics mode"... do I select that one?

Is 150 memory really needed? I get same amount of -temps from just having memory of my 6950 at 759Mhz than ~300Mhz.

No it's probably not, but I like to cause problems for myself ;)

Alright guys another quick update.

I managed to boot into "low graphics mode" using dadittox's suggestion, and then I ran aticonfig --initial --adapter=all in the terminal because I could not see anything about booting into safe Xorg...

And no luck. Possibly because the  graphics cards were disabled in a sense (although I was using one to see my desktop..? I could not see them via poclbm or aticonfig..?)

I then re-booted back into recovery mode, and ran "root" (the lats option) this time, and entered aticonfig --adapter=all --initial and it seemed to notify fglrx of all my cards now! Hurrah!

I reboot the computer again and am asked to select the proper grub again, so this time I boot into regular ubuntu and... still nothing :S

So at this point I have ran aticonfig --adapter=all --initial, found all of the cards now, but when I boot back into ubuntu I am met with a purplish/dark screen. It's not black, and it's not off, it's kindof purple. Which is exactly how it was before... any ideas?

EDIT: actually the "ubuntu * * * * *" logo did show up, but the dots are not moving/changing at all and it has been stuck on that screen now for ~5 minutes.

I am going to try and flash all of the cards BIOSes back to normal and see if that helps any... Don't really want to install ubuntu over again... it takes forever on a usb stick :S

EDIT 2: I have now flashed all of the cards back to their original BIOSes... boot into ubuntu recovery mode "root" terminal... and ran aticonfig --adapter=all --initial which found all of the cards (yay!) but I am still met with that non-moving ubuntu logo screen. Does ubuntu say something like "we will only work with 5 cards on this install" and then if you install a 6th is blows up or something?? This is all I can deduce from this at the current moment. I guess I will try re-installing ubuntu completely and starting over.

Sounds more to me like the fglrx driver and your BIOS weren't geting along. I happened a few times to me in testing different BIOS's. I would boot up and get a really weird almost checker board pattern when the desktop came up.

If you are presented with a text-based login prompt:

1. Login as yourself
2. Become root with sudo -i
3. Move the current Xorg configuration file (effectively deleting it, but keeping a spare copy) which will force xorg to create a new one:
   mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11.xorg.conf.save
4. Leave root      exit
5. startx
6. Open a terminal and type sudo aticonfig --initial
7. sudo reboot
8. GDM (the graphical login) should start automatically now.