After an aptitude safe-update my laptop doesn't boot any more.
I recorded the following video of the boot process: [URL] ....
The disk is fine (I ran fsck), GRUB in OK. Could it be X?
I can boot in safe-mode and also have internet connection, so not everything is lost ...
I deleted both the partition with archlinux and the swap in order expand the windows xp partition. I am now unable to boot, just as gparted warned me. When I turn my computer on, it just goes to a black screen with a flashing underscore.
I cannot type anything, but cntrl-alt-dlt does restart. I have been attempting to restore grub and/or windows's boot method for the last 24hrs. The main things I've tried were the instructions here and using super grub disk. However, I have not been successful. I am running an Ubuntu live disk. At the moment, I just want to be able to run windows, but do not have an xp disk because this laptop was issued from my old college.
I've just installed ubuntu 9.10 from a live cd on to a 2nd HDD, with vista on the 1st. When I turn my PC on GRUB comes up and I can select ubuntu or vista, vista works but when I try to boot ubuntu the screen goes black with a small flashing underscore in the top left and then just goes completely black, nothing else happens after this. I've tried reinstalling from the live cd but when I go install nothing happens and the screen goes black again. When I was installing I changed the boot to something like scsi?
My PC's specs are:
Dell inspiron 531
HDD1: Ubuntu(300GB)
HDD2: Vista(1TB)
OS
Windows vista
Graphics card.
ATI radeon HD 4700 series
CPU
AMD Athleon 64 x2 6000+
Mainboard
Manufacturer : Dell
Model: 0RY206
BIOS: dell 1.0.13
I had switched over from Windows to Ubuntu and got rid of windows completely but still had the recovery partition and deleted it. I then tried to add that space to another partition, "Media." For whatever reason it deleted the "Media" partition so I used TestDisk to restore it. I did something wrong and when I rebooted my computer it would not boot so I used my LiveCD to check whats wrong and it had deleted all of my partitions and Ubuntu was nowhere to be found.
So I used TestDisk again to recover them, this time it was successful. The problem now however is that when I start my computer it does not boot into Ubuntu it just shows a black screen with the white underscore ("_") flashing in the corner. I'm not sure but I don't think it is booting into the correct partition, I think it would be trying to boot the first partition, /dev/sda1, rather than /dev/sda3. If this is the problem how could I fix it?
I had switched over from Windows to Ubuntu and got rid of windows completely but still had the recovery partition and deleted it. I then tried to add that space to another partition, "Media." For whatever reason it deleted the "Media" partition so I used TestDisk to restore it. I did something wrong and when I rebooted my computer it would not boot so I used my LiveCD to check whats wrong and it had deleted all of my partitions and Ubuntu was nowhere to be found. So I used TestDisk again to recover them, this time it was successful. when I start my computer it does not boot into Ubuntu it just shows a black screen with the white underscore ("_") flashing in the corner. I'm not sure but I don't think it is booting into the correct partition, I think it would be trying to boot the first partition, /dev/sda1, rather than /dev/sda3. If this is the problem how could I fix it? I got all the boot loader information, here it is:
[code]...
so I installed fedora 12 last night, everything was fine. Installed some things, moved music over, etc. (Dual booting with windows vista btw) So I install my graphics card driver, (ATI Radeon HD 3200) and I reboot. When I open the bootloader (I think thats what it is), It starts to boot, then just has a black screen with the flashing underscore. I can type and stuff but nothing happens.
View 6 Replies View RelatedAlright I installed Ubuntu fine, everything was working great. And I was able to shut down and startup the system once or twice. But now all of a sudden, when I power up, the screen stays at the DOS terminal with the blinking underscore at the top line. It never changes, won't load, etc. What in the world happened?
View 1 Replies View RelatedSo, to start of this is about a fedora 12 x86_64 installation from DVD media downloaded via torrent and verified by checksums and dvd verification tool
hardware is:athlon x4 620
4GB 2channel ddr3 1600mhz ram
1x 250gd sata2 hdd
asrock mobo with amd 785 chipset (radeon HD4200 128mb onborad mem + 512mb from ram) + raid controller (1,0,10,raid ready,jbod)
First of this is my first linux installation and even though I have read the installation instructions and documentation thoroughly, I can't exlude the possibility tha I messed up (BIIIIG). So, what happened in my
case:
installed fedora 12 from dvd on a raid ready sata disk.I should point out that trying to install with the default selection (selection 1 on dvd boot menu) resulted in a system crash/freeze, with the monitor displaying white/pink and green/black stripes, so I did the installation with the basic display driver instead (option 2 in the dvd's boot menu)during installation I left most things on default. Especialy grub I didn't even touch. It said that it would setup grub on the disk's MBR which sounded ok to me.Things I did change were:Partition Layout, 300MB boot on 1st primary partition, 32GB root on 2nd, 16GB swap on 3rd, /home and /tmp on Logical Volume (partition 4) wich is the rest of the disks space about 200GB Installed packages (added web development packages as well as java , eclipse etc.)
installation completed without showing any errors so the system rebooted.once booted from the disk (hdd) the installation was done in, the system would just freeze on a black screen with a blinking underscore. this freeze happened before grub showed any signs of existence
So after I checked and rechecked the consistency of the error and rummaged around the internet for info I thought that it would be wise to try and boot the installed system using some other procedure. (I should point out that at this point that I redid the Fedora installation a couple of times trying different setups but apparently nothing helped)So I tried the "Boot from local drive" option, which resulted in starting up the system with no errors.Leaving the, I assume, grub settup problems for later (I have no internet on that computer yet) I started looking around and familiarizing myself with the new environment and realized that the monitor driver was working only up to 1280x800 and since my monitor is a full HD TFT panel I went to find instructions on how to instal the ati display driver.finding these: gofedora.com/how-to-install-ati-catalyst-fglrx-98-drivers-fedora-11/I downloaded the .run file copied it from laptop to desktop via flash drive and started the above listed procedure I only got to step 5 (blacklisting) since when I tried to save the file the system said something about having to be root user So I logged out to try to login as root but something went wrong during logout because all colors went funny and high contrast and kind of blurry (text was quite difficult to read) and after I hit (panicked out of my mind) a few buttons I got a fullscreen console with the messages:Bridge firewalling registered virbr0: starting userspace STP failed, starting kernel STP I cand remember if I could type or issue any commands at that point but apparently I rebooted the system (again via the insallation media)Grub starts the boot sequence, fedora loading bar appears, only to issue the message:"lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions" At this point I can write to the machine but nothing happens and i can move around the mouse with a huge white rectangle for a cursor(for selecting stuff i guess)
I installed Vista on my Acer 64-bit laptop first, then installed Ubuntu 9.10 in a dual-boot configuration. And when I start up my computer, Windows Vista is an option in the Grub menu. But when I use the grub loader to load Vista all I see is a black screen, with a flashing underscore character (it looks a lot like a terminal screen, waiting for input). The screen just stays like this, too - I timed it once, and 13 minutes later it was the same.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI ran into a problem the moment i installed 11.1. The GUI wouldn't show up (ctrl+alt+f2 yeilded a black screen with a blinking underscore). Failsafe worked fine, though.
So, i tried entering, one by one, every parameter that was entered in the failsafe boot options. Entering 'x11failsafe' gave me a flawless GUI. So, i opened the '/boot/grub/menu.lst' file and added this parameter in the 'showopts' of the normal mode, to make it permanent. Fine. Now, what exactly have i done?
Note- I use an NVidia 8000 series Graphic card. I'll post more details if you need them.
I have downloaded the latest iso from the Fedora site (15 32-bit). I am using a netbook and so I have used the tool suggested on the site to copy the iso to my usb drive. Before this I formatted it to fat32 in Windows and then used the tool. When I rebooted with my USB drive, all that shows is a blinking _. I tried repeating the process again but the same happened.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI completed my dvd-burn for Fedora 10. I booted up from the dvd, and the automatic 10 second installation text shows up. The setup loads the images, and proceeds to a loading bar. After the loading bar I saw an underscore. That all I see.. I wait a couple of minutes and I still only see an underscore. This is my first time trying to install a Unix type O.S. Are there any commands I need to run for the installation to move forward? Or is there some type of corruption in the installation?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI recently removed Winblows Vista from my laptop and replaced it with Kubuntu 10.10 (I left the recovery partition on there, just in case). When I turn on the computer, the GRUB menu appears, I press enter, then a little flashing underscore appears on the screen in the top left hand corner. After a few seconds, the Kubuntu logo appears and I can log in.But yesterday I replace Kubuntu with Ubuntu 10.10. The Boot process is the same, but the little flashing underscore in the top left hand corner flashes for about 10 seconds longer then Kubuntu 10.10 did, and then a few paragraphs of text appears for a few seconds, then I am logged in automatically.Is this "unusual" boot process anything to worry about, or am I just being a noob.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI installed 10.10 of the live boot CD. It said everything went fine, now when I go to boot into Linux it just flashes the underscore on a black screen. What do I do from here?
View 1 Replies View RelatedAfter succesfully installing Ubuntu 10.4 x32 and rebooting pc hangs on black screen with a flashing white dot in the top left corner of my screen, i've tried installing it twice with the same results.
my setup is: Asus p5q-e,
4 gig of corsair dual ram,
ati 4850 graphics,
onboard audio.
ahci mode
win 7 installed on intel ssd, and xp on a samsung 320 gb sata 2,
i had this configuration running fine for 2 months without boot loaders,
on pc start up i choose from which hdd to boot from.
i installed ubuntu on the samsung drive where it was recognised fine, wiped it all and installed automatically.
pls let me know if there is anything i missed, and advice if possible in what to do.
thanks
kannanni
I just recently installed Ubuntu 10.04. Every time I boot it up the screen flashes, like going off, then on again. It won't stop doing that. I can see the screen for 1 sec then it goes black, and keeps repeating this.
View 5 Replies View RelatedMy parents just upgraded from their 8+ year old desktop to a newer dell. The old one has XP on it and would barely run, lots of bloatware, viruses, etc.. I tried putting an ubuntu 10.10 disc to boot from it but the old desktop suddenly stopped recognizing mouse and keyboard input so I couldn't change the boot preferences. I took the hard drive out and plugged it into my desktop, copied all the useful files to my hard drive, then wiped it. I then installed ubuntu on the old -and now empty- hard drive by having it plugged into my computer.
I put the hard drive back in the old desktop and found that the keyboard now works. I can press F2 or F12 and change things around and whatnot. However, when I let it pass the screen that prompts me to press F2 or F12, it goes to a screen with a blinking underscore in the top left of the screen and gets stuck there.
what's causing it to get stuck on this screen?
I have been using Unix / Linux for quite some time now. But there is still one thing that annoys me. When I disable the GUI interface I get a blinking under-tow (see-below)
_
And I have no idea what button is used to get the computers attention / login.
I can't boot Ubuntu 9.10 on this computer (on my other computer it works fine). When I try to run it from the CD or USB I see a screen full of colored lines, and when I try to use safe graphics I get to the shell but the whole screen is blinking and I can't type any command. Anyone knows how to solve it? My graphics card is GeForce 7300 LE and on my other computer (the one that can run Ubuntu find) has an on-board graphics card.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have just updated to 10.04 on my Dell Insperon 8200 laptop, and all seems well with Linux.My problem is that although it shows in Grub Windows XP will not load. I just get a blank screen with a flashing cursor.I have tried to grub-mkconfig and grub-update, both of which reported successful results.However on reboot I still get a blank screen for windows.This was not an issue with 9.04 and 9.10.so I don't think it is the machine.
View 5 Replies View RelatedAfter installing Fedora 15 from LiveUSB and rebooting it just hangs on a black screen with a blinking cursor (underscore) in the top left of the screen. If it's reached grub, it isn't responding to any commands, and mashing several key combinations (such as ctrl-alt-f1) will produce a beep usually emitted only by the BIOS (hinting that it may never be making its way to grub).
The only particularly interesting thing about the install is that by default it wanted to boot itself from the MBR on my primary-master (Windows) disk. Instead I selected the option to boot from "the first partition in sdb1", which is my primary-slave (Linux) disk, (the first partition being /boot). This way I can change which OS boots by changing the boot order in my BIOS, and so avoiding bootloader wars.
Just posting this so others can find the solution more easily than I did.My HP ProBook 4520s had a blinking/flashing wireless indicator LED and the connection was unstable. The solution was to blacklist the rt2800pci drivers. This leaves the rt2860sta drivers, which work fine for me (so far). The device is actually a RaLink RT3090 and apparently they release drivers on their web site, but I did not want to go through the trouble of building it and did not find it packaged for 10.10.To try this fix, open up the blacklist file.
Code:
gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
And add this line at the end...
[code]....
I've got two laptops running Ubuntu. Both have had Lucid installed from the live cd. I have upgraded one of them to Maverick. Both distributions are running great after they boot up, but I haven't experienced any faster boot times with either distibution. Both boot to Bios and then the screen goes black with a blinking cursor in upper left corner of the screen. The black screen remains for 30 to 45 seconds and then I get the Ubuntu splash screen for maybe 5 seconds, and then desktop. Why am I not seeing faster boot times? I realize 45 to 60 seconds is good compared to other os's, but I anticipated much faster boot times. Shut down on the other hand is quite fast at maybe 5 to 10 seconds. Does anyone else get this black screen on boot? Seems like wasted time cause I can't tell what's going on during the time there is a black screen. This is not a real big deal breaker, as I don't reboot very often, but I just wonder why bootup isn't faster.
View 7 Replies View RelatedI recently wiped and partitioned my hard drive on my Sony Vaio Z series laptop. I set up the NTFS partition for windows, the Ext-4 partition for Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix, and a large NTFS partition for my all my media. I installed the netbook remix off of a flash drive, and I couldn't have asked for a smoother install. Everything went fine, and I proceeding to install google chrome and all the other little goodies. After that, I configured all my settings and ran the update manager to get everything just fine. After a reboot, I became frustrated and prevented maximus from running on start up because I did not want every windows I opened to be maximized. After a reboot, the screen would flash very brightly more than once per second. I could see the top bar with the processes and such as well as the correct background, but I cannot do anything because the screen will not stop flashing. I figured out I could stop it from flashing by pressing ctrl+alt+F7, but the screen just freezes where it is at and is still unusable. Desperate to start enjoying my Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I wiped the Ubuntu partition and reinstalled and did everything EXACTLY the same except instead of preventing maximus from opening, I used gconf-editor to change the setting to not maximize everything by default. Reboot, exact same problem.
I've searched everywhere for a solution, but I only find people with vague similarities or explanations. Could it possibly be a graphics problem? My laptop has 2 graphics cards in it - an Intel integrated one and an nVidia one. The nVidia one has a hardware issue so I just use the Intel one for now. It is also worth noting that I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 (desktop) on my machine before and I never had any such problem.
Also, I tried booting up in the "safe mode" equivalent, but I eventually encounter a black screen and I am forced to hold down the power button to shut it down.
(also, if it's worth anything, I know how to use windows well if there's any way I can change something in Ubuntu from my windows installation)
when I install them all goes well but when I get into the GUIs I can hardly press anything - major bug with mouse and it is really annoying. Secondly there is a big gap between the GUI and my screen's edge. Hmm, I think - it must be a problem with the GPU driver and that might be the thing also messing with the mouse clicks. I download the drivers provided by the Ubuntu community - all goes well and I restart - stuck at purple screen after the "moving dots" on boot. So I reinstall the whole OS and try with the drivers provided by NVIDIA - same thing. I try the same procedure with Kubuntu and no progress.
View 2 Replies View RelatedRunning 10.04 as the only OS on a HP desktop - been running fine for months. Did an update - probably hadn't done one for a couple of months - may be a red herring. The system appeared to crash while inactive. Trying to boot - I get the Ubuntu 10.04 screen for a short while then it goes to blank screen with a flashing cursor at the top - occasionally it will give me an error that /home is not ready - skip or manual fix. I have sda1 = ext4 root
sda2 = swap
sda3 = ext4 home
sdb1 = ntfs
I removed sdb1 from fstab as initially it was complaining about this drive not being ready. The error switched to complaining about /home. I am able to mount both of those filesystems with no problem manually. I ran mke3fs on /home (I forgot the -n parameter! but no problem as I have good backups) - same error - complains about /home not being available at boot even though I can always manually mount it from live cd or manual recovery. I can rebuild this system - and I may as it was upgraded from 9.10 - I may do a fresh 10.04, but I would like to fix the boot problem in case something like this happens again when I actually care about fixing it.I recreated the grub2 configs - I don't have the command to hand, something like: sudo update-grub --root-directory=/mnt/boot/grub /dev/sda
I have just recently installed Linux Lime along with windows 7 Home Premium. Before, there would be a menu asking me which operating system I would like to use. When I click linux it goes to linux and windows 7 goes to windows 7. Now when I click Linux, the black screen you get at the beginning shows a - (dash) constantly flashing on a black screen and won't boot to linux. This is normal as it does that for a second then boots. Now its stuck on that flashing dash on a black screen and won't boot.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI'm using debian for the first time and I recently downloaded the Debian Lenny 201 Live CD to test it on my old computer (I'm planning to use Debian 5.0.4). It has a Pentium III (550 MHz) processor, 192 MB RAM, 8 MB graphics memory, 20 GB HDD with a monitor supporting 1024x768 resolution. The problem is, after the booting is complete a blank flashing screen appears with a cross-shaped cursor in the middle. I continues and nothing happens. I tried with solutions like editing the entries with 'live xdriver=fbdev', 'live xdriver=none', and 'live vga=771'.
View 10 Replies View RelatedI built my computer and having trouble booting Ubuntu, here are my system specifications.
System Specifications:
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 3.0GHz Quad-Core
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB 128-bit GDDR5
Motherboard: ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3
Memory: 4G G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR3 1600
PSU: Cooler Master GX Series 750w
HDD: 500GB Samsung 7200 RPM
I have Ubuntu on a DVD and have tried both my DVD drives, AND an external DVD drive and have no luck. I have tried different versions of Ubuntu and get the same problem. So I boot it fine and it gets the the Ubuntu splash screen and I select "Install Ubuntu" it loads for a few seconds then goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner. It sits here forever. I tested on my friends computer with very similar processor and it blinks for about 3 seconds then an Ubuntu splash screen appears with dots under it and it loads and works fine.
So I am 100% positive the DVD is fine and should work for my processor also. I do have Windows 7 currently installed. And I made a 100 GB partition via Windows 7 using Easeus Partition Manager. If it matters, I did test Ubuntu on my computer by installing it from VirtualBox and it worked fine...but I'd rather do a dualboot because I don't like running an OS in another OS and its performance isn't so great when emulating an Operating System...
I initially installed Debian Lenny on my system but couldn't get sound to work so I upgraded to squeeze hoping that the newer kernel would somehow fix that. Unfortunately, the update caused the screen to flash on and off starting at the login screen - I'd get a split second with the screen on and then it would go off for a second or two. The boot screen still allows me to boot from Lenny's linux kernel, and that still works. I also had this problem when I installed ubuntu on this computer so after some searching around I remembered that adding radeon.modeset=0 as a boot option fixed this. Now the screen no longer flashes, but everything is really slow - I think that disabled graphics acceleration? After some searching around it seems that these problems are probably caused by something called KMS in newer linux kernels but I don't really know.
Anyway, does anyone have any ideas as to how I could turn on graphics acceleration again without having the screen flashing on and off? Or suggestions for making sound work? I think in the past (on ubuntu) I ended up having to enable the proprietary graphics driver, but on the other linux distros i've tried I used proprietary graphics and flash and my computer got slower and slower and started to crash, so I'd rather stick to the open source driver if possible - i don't need really need 3d acceleration. Stability is the reason I switched to debian. My computer is running Debian squeeze amd64, intel core 2 duo e8400, ati radeon 4830, 4 gigs of ram. relevant results from lspci: 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller. 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV770 LE [Radeon HD 4800 Series] 01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc HD48x0 audio maybe part of the audio problem is that there are two audio devices listed?