Ubuntu :: Laptop Won't Boot, Black Screen Just Before Grub?
Jan 2, 2011
I installed Ubuntu 10.10 to dual boot alongside Windows 7 on a Dell Inspiron. This worked fine and after restarting it seemed to be working normally, after the first boot into windows though when I tried to restart the laptop again I just get a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the top left instead of the grub screen.I'm still able to boot the LiveCD fine and tried to reinstall Ubuntu but the exact same thing happened? Anyone know what's going on/how to fix this?
I've been running openSuse 11.2 for a while on my notebook.Today I turned it off at work and came home. When I tried to turn it on, it boots, shows a black screen written 'GRUB' and then NOTHING. It doesn't complete the boot process.
Here's the problem: My ubuntu goes into a black screen with "_" flashing after selecting the kernel in grub menu. Everything has been working just fine since I installed it (about a month ago, when 11.04 came out). The problem must have something to do with grub not finding the correct partition or something like that. I was messing around with pysdm, trying to make it auto-mount one of my partitions, so that's the likely cause of my problem. However, I did not edit anything on the ubuntu partition, only the partition where my files are located. Is there any way to tell grub which partition to load upon booting up?
PC specs: i7 920, Ati HD5870, 4GB ram Installing Ubuntu 10.04 from a USB stick. The stick is fine as I installed Ubuntu on my laptop with it no problem.
Problem #1: The grub boot manager is missing. The first time I installed Ubuntu it appeared as usual and let me choose between windows 7 and ubuntu. Due to the black screen issues I uninstalled Ubuntu. Since then, every time I've tried reinstalling it I don't get the grub boot manager, instead my PC goes straight to windows. I have formatted the partition I installed Ubuntu on, as well as installing it on another drive, to no effect.
Problem #2: After the Ubuntu splash screen, I'm greeted by a black screen. After a few seconds my monitor goes into standby. Ctrl+alt+f1 does nothing, and removing quiet and splash from the command line didn't help either. I hear I need to use vesa drivers but I have no idea how to go about this when I can't even get the OS to start in the first place.
I dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. Sometime between 4/18 and a few days ago, something happened with Windows booting up. Ubuntu boots fine, but whenever I try to boot Windows, it just goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor (the command line kind, not a pointer). At first I thought it was Windows, but I have run the repair CD and executed chkdsk /f and chkdsk /r on all partition related to windows. No effect.
I ran a system check designed for issues with booting up, and it found no errors. I have looked at my GRUB files, and they all look fine. I am not sure if it is GRUB or Windows. I tried reinstalling the Windows boot-loader, and it had the same effect, the only difference is that it bypassed GRUB. The reason I think it may be GRUB is that the error happened around the same time as me upgrading from Karmic to the Lucid RC. I have posted this on a Windows 7 forum.
I am having trouble with the grub boot menu. I have a dual boot system, Windows XP 32 bit and Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit. Windows was preexisting when I installed Ubuntu. The install went fine but when I restarted, the Grub menu gives the option of the Windows boot loader but when I tab to that and press enter the screen goes black and the curser just blinks in the upper left corner...no XP boot. The XP drive is there as I can mount it from Ubuntu side but when I try to boot into it it does not seem to be there. What have I done and what can be done so that I can boot into the XP side?
I've had Windows 7 installed for a few months now and would like to install Fedora 12 on a separate partition. I've tried this three times now, all of them ending with something wrong. The problem that exists for me now is that when I install Fedora 12 and boot up for the first time in GRUB, Fedora 12 works fine. ut when I boot into Windows 7 from GRUB, it just comes up with a black screen and says "BOOTMGR is missing; press ctrl + alt + del to restart" at the top. I don't believe that GRUB is booting into the wrong partition because I have no Windows recovery partition, just Windows 7. Also when I try and fix the Windows 7 partition with the system recovery disk, it says that the volume is corrupt every time. At this point I have everything backed up on a separate drive so I'm open to try installing Fedora 12 again even if it risks screwing up my Windows 7 partition, I would really just like to have a functioning dual boot.
is it ever possible to do dual booting with grub(legacy) ever at all!. it is possible provided i take some pain, here is the link of that post [URL] i was coward and weak i didn't try that out then. but i did try it out. now so if u haven't seen the post .... I've installed Fedora 15 desktop(Gnome) with physical Logical volume called vg_fedora lv_root(ext4) ,lv_swap and lv_home(ext4), with 500MB /boot partition and had about 200GB free hard disk space ... so i wanted to install Scientific Linux 6.1 (because our school uses RHEL 6.1)
so, while running the installer I made (added) a logical volume lv_Scientific with ext4 FS and made its mount point (/) and used the MBR /boot which overwrote the Fedora /boot (completely OK and was as expected) i restarted after installation i got SL log in and as per the directions of the thread i copied the boot stanza from grub.conf of fedora 15 (which i already had copied and pasted into a text file and copied it from there)and pasted it into grub.conf of SL you may ask why did i choose same physical LVM too save swap space ... if i had made another physical LVM i had to make another swap ( i like LVM ... its cool)
completely unexpected happened Fedora now boots but not SL when grub starts i get this error 27 unrecognised commad and when i press <enter> i get grub menu with SL and fedora when i press on Fedora it works well i get my fedora login and i did login .. everything works fine but when i press SL it goes to the previous black screen grub error 27
My laptop screen will go black while i'm using it. I do not have any screensaver enabled. It just goes black (whenever) and I have to reboot to use my machine again
I installed Ubuntu 11.04 today as the main OS on my laptop.I had deleted my XP partition, and repartitioned it according to a guide I had found. (http:url)......Basically it was setup like this: 500mb ext2 primary partition, has the grub folder, I believe this is either the '/' partition, or the '/boot' partition 2gb swap space logical partition
10gb ext4 logical partition -- this is either the '/' or the '/boot', it contains the 'bin,boot,cdrom,dev' etc folders 243gb (the rest of my hard drive, with the exception of a partition that contains documents and files from my XP OS, formatted to NTFS) ext4, this is the one that has all my desktop/documents/etc folders.After Ubuntu was done installing, I had some message pop up about installing an ATI proprietary driver for my ATI graphics card (an ATI Radeon HD 4330, I believe, I may have messed that number up). I installed it and rebooted, no problem.
Next, I had another update window pop up with 198 items checked and ready to download and install. I went through all of this, and rebooted, again, no problem.Next thing I did was install some apps that were essential for me to have to use for my work (an ide, chat programs, etc). No problem with any of that.Last thing to install was the OSE Virtualbox, and then I installed WindowsXP Pro and Windows Vista Business, then installed the guest addition addon for VB. This all worked without any issues whatsoever.
Time goes on, and I notice my computer is heating up much more than (seemingly) normal. I begin to wonder if its my graphics card. So I shut down the computer and let it cool down. Reboot, and no problem, still working fine.Then I opened a couple of apps and tried a simple game (can't remember the name) I believe it was a simple 3d topdown, as I wanted to test my graphics card. This is where things seemed to start to go wrong. My laptop began hanging, not even allowing me to access the terminal via ctrl+alt+f2. The screen flashed and I saw the blue/green/grey fuzz that I get when the graphics card is starting to heat up too much. Then everything hangs and I can't do anything at all, including move the mouse. I did a hard reboot (I believe this is what you call pulling the plug/pressing the power button, correct me if I'm wrong). I then rebooted, saw a chkdisk, then it booted seemingly normal, but it hung right after the purple screen after the grub screen.
This is pretty much where I'm at right now. I strongly suspect the fault is with the ATI drivers, but have been completely unsuccessful in my attempts to fix it. I've googled just about everything I could think of, along with searching these forums. I've tried just about everything listed in the forums, but to no avail.I've tried the commands that are supposed to purge the ati drivers, but all I get are errors that say they can't remove the 'virtual drivers'.
Right now I'm booting off a live cd, so I know the computer still works fine, just not my actual installed OS. I'd really like to get the issue resolved without having to reinstall, as it took quite awhile just to get it usable in the first place, but this has already taken so much time, I may just resort to that if we can't solve it any other way. Got too much work to catch up on as it is.As a re-instated note, perhaps if you have any tips, but not particularly about fixing the OS, my laptop (I'm strongly guessing my graphics card) is heating up much more than normal, compared to that when XP was installed. Is this more than likely just a driver issue, as is the rest of it? Also, I did have Compiz installed, though I didn't choose for it to be installed, I believe it came pre-installed. I've heard it could cause some issues, though I have no idea as to the validity or relation to this particular issue.
Edit: I just remembered while searching for a solution, I found a post somewhere that said something about the information not being sent to the monitor from the graphics card properly, thus no desktop. I'm guessing that'd still fall under the driver issues, but again, I'm unsure. I would think that wouldn't be entirely true anyway, since I can still see my mouse fine, just no desktop, only a black screen.
I can't seem to get Ubuntu to run on my old Dell Dimension 2300. It boots to a purple screen then it goes to a black screen with a load of writing nothing else happens after this screen. [URL] Could someone advise how I can get it to work?
I turned on my Acer laptop and during bootup it seemed normal. After it passed the blue Acer logo, all I could see is a black screen and a black cursor outlined in white in the shape of an X. Thinking it would be a one time thing, I turned it off again.it still was a black screen.
another post about this. I just don't know how to handle this, as I'm pretty nsee the grub loading menu, but screen just freezes after, no way I can reboot, or open a console. In recovery mode I can log as root in console, though.I run Debian 6, 64 bits. I have an intel q6600 and a nvidia geforce 9800GX2.
My laptop was shut down normally, but when it restarts - it just shows the very first image (Toshiba something....) which is the screen where it says what commands to type to get into bios.
After this - the screen shows nothing more. All black, except some faint (extremely faint) lines...
I don't know - my first thought was that the screen itself was caput, but since it shows the initial screen - I guess it's not...
Got a problem with Ubuntu 9.10 and a Lenovo T400 with an ATI Radeon Mobility HD3400 and ATI drivers /ATI contol center. Whenever the laptop wakes up from power-saving mode, the screen goes black (with some jagged mulicolored lines).
I'm having problems with the screen going black on startup in 10.10. It appears to go completely off (no backlight or anything). If I press ctri+alt+f1 I get a terminal, then I can ctrl+alt+f7 and the desktop appears. I have tried setting the mode to the correct resolution in xorg.conf and I tried using the vesa driver, but it still doesn't work. My graphics card shows as sis 661/741/760
Whenever I use the function hibernate or sleep - or just generally close my lid on my laptop, my laptop displays a black screen when I open the lid again - though it is turned on.
Basically, it hibernates/sleeps the laptop when I close the lid. When I open the lid though, it turns on the laptop, but brings me a black screen.
I try to install openSUSE 11.4 KDE RC 2, unfortunately I show black screen after GRUB screen. I must press Power button to turn off my computer. I hope it won't on openSUSE 11.4 stable. I'm waiting for downloading openSUSE 11.4.
I have a sony vaio laptop(model-VPCCW27FX) 64 bit.I am currently using windows 7 os. I tried installing ubuntu using wubi and also by making a bootable disc. The installation proceeds well. When I restart my laptop, it asks whether to start windows or ubuntu.But, when I select ubuntu, the screen goes blank.
I like to suspend my laptop when I close the lid. I have squeeze installed. When I open the laptop lid all lights indicated that it coming out of suspend but the monitor stays black. It is worse since I install the ati drivers for the card instead of the xorg. It did it with both but worse with nonfree drivers. I can get it to come out by ctrl alt f2 and the ctrl alt f7. However yesterday that did not work but that was the first time. My laptop is an acer 5251-1513 amd processor v120, and hd 4250 radeon
I'm running Debian Squeeze on a Dell Studio 1558 laptop, and I have my laptop set to suspend when my lid is closed. Resuming from suspend seems to work but the screen remains blank, forcing me to hard reboot every time. Upon reading this thread
Code: Tue Jun 21 23:07:12 AKDT 2011: performing suspend Tue Jun 21 23:07:28 AKDT 2011: Awake.
The screen of my years-old HP laptop (running Natty) freezes and eventually turns black. Ctrl-Alt-F# works to switch to the terminals. My fan is even louder than usual. I spend some time fooling around with ps and kill and shut down some of the most resource-consuming processes, which quiets the fan a bit, but tty7 still shows a black screen except for my mouse pointer.
I finally decide to shut it down altogether, but then I think to myself, "Self, you've used the power switch to shut down before in this situation, but shouldn't there be a more proper way to do it in the terminal?" So I try shutdown, I have trouble with it, it proceeds to get hopelessly tangled up, and it looks like it's frozen up in mid-restart when I throw up my hands and decide to go for the old power-switch-for-five-seconds method after all. Now when I start the computer and select Ubuntu from GRUB, I get this:
Just upgraded to 10.04.1 today and after I turn on the computer it goes to a screen asking for my username and password. Have tried to input my details but with no success.
I also tried pressing 'ALT-F7', but still no look, just takes me to a black screen with nothing.
I'm running Debian Squeeze on a Dell Studio 1558 laptop, and I have my laptop set to suspend when my lid is closed. Resuming from suspend seems to work but the screen remains blank, forcing me to hard reboot every time. Upon reading this thread:
Tue Jun 21 23:07:12 AKDT 2011: performing suspend Tue Jun 21 23:07:28 AKDT 2011: Awake. Tue Jun 21 23:07:28 AKDT 2011: Running hooks for resume
I have a laptop and an external monitor connected via displayport. I can configure both displays via settings with correct resolution and arrangement. However, this configuration is not sticking, and every time I shut down the laptop or close the lid I will need to fight with black screens and more to bring the same configuration again. Basically, it seems that the monitor is "stealing" the primary role to the laptop's native screen (I have it configured as secondary, but also being primary the configuration gets messed).
After many trial & errors, this is the routine I have found to make things work every time I boot / awake the system:
1. Boot. Laptop's display shows the booting sequence. 2. When the login screen should appear, laptop's display goes black, monitor shows background. 3. If I press F9 to increase brightness, the brightness icon appears in the monitor, but it is stuck at the minimum. 4. The only way to leave this point is by pressing F7 (project screen) and then F9 again to increase brightness. Then the laptop's screen does light up.
This is when I'm lucky. Sometimes the configuration goes mad and I get mirrored displays and different resolutions, without touching the settings myself. Also, if I unplug the displayport I run the risk of getting stuck with a black screen in the laptop, without any way of recovering the GUI other than rebooting (Ctrl Alt F2 will still show the command line screen).
My system is Debian 8 testing up to date, running in a Lenovo T430 with Intel components. I'm not sure the monitor is relevant here, but in any case it is an Eizo CS240.
I have an Asus z9100 laptop with an Intel 855GM integrated graphics chip, which is running Karmic (the purpose of the laptop is to be a MythTV frontend so my understanding is that it needs to run 9.x in order to connect to the MythTV 0.22 backend - I have installed and configured this using the installable Mythbuntu package) and the laptop is subject to this bug which causes random freezes:
[URL]
So, following advice for similar freezes I've seen, I have added the following options to my grub menu.lst on the kernel line:
nolapic nomodeset
and I have edited xorg.conf so that it makes use of the vesa driver instead of the Intel driver. This results in no freezes and if I wanted to watch Myth on the laptop screen I'd be squared away. However, the laptop has a damaged screen so the point was always to output the signal to an external monitor via its VGA out.
When I attach the external monitor and boot with the setup as described, the external monitor is never detected. But I noticed that if I remove the "nolapic nomodeset" from the kernel boot line, it is detected. However, signal is only output to it during the earliest part of boot (when the Ubuntu logo is in the center of the screen before the full-screen graphic with the animated progress line), after which the external monitor goes black and all the display output goes to the laptop screen. The external monitor power button is still lit up green as if it has been detected and is receiving signal, but it's just a black screen.
get the signal out to the external monitor after the initial part of the boot process, using the vesa driver? Here is the current state of my xorg.conf:
Code: Section "Device" Identifier "Configured Video Device" Driver "vesa" EndSection
'm trying to duel boot windows 7 and ubuntu 11.04 on an Acer Aspire 5736, but when I try to boot from the cd (which I burned with InfraRecorder) it first goes to a black screen with a blinking under score in the corner, then to a purple screen with a couple symbols at the bottom, and then the screen goes black and nothing else ever happens
After 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.
I'm use ubuntu 8.10 ( on a msi 645 notebook ) and i'm trying to shutdown from grub. I have add these entries to menu.lst after the ### END AUTOMAGIC KERNEL LIST
title Halt halt
I only get a black screen but the pc is still running someone said it only put grub to sleep or something. I also tried this commands sudo shutdown -h now or init 0, poweroff... but there all "unrecognized commands" in grub... Is there a possibilty to shutdown from grub.
I have installed Maverick onto an INTENSO 320GB USB Hard Disk. I can boot from GRUB, but only get a dark grey screen, with no cursor. I have tried editing the boot script, removing "quiet & splash" and putting in "nomodeset". I have also tried "i915.modeset=1" and "i915.modeset=0". Also "xforcevesa" and "nouveau.modeset=0". None have worked. I have not been able to reach a console screen to log in. Here are the specifications of the machine:
[Code]....
Are the number of spaces between "ro" and "quiet and splash" essential? There are three spaces on the boot script and I have left them there. Ubuntu works fine as a live CD, and I experienced no problems with the installation.
