My 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.
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.
Alright 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?
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.
I 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?
I 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.
So, 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
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 just installed Ubuntu 10.04.1 (desktop edition) on my netbook (NB200), the installation worked fine, but when i restart i get a black screen with a blinking underscore on the top left corner. I don't have any options as any key that i press is just printed on the screen. (This happened with every version that I tried so far, even the netbook remixes).
If I don't press anything for some minutes, Ubuntu is finally starting, but without showing the Ubuntu loading screen in the process, like it did when I tried it with the USB.
My internal is sda windows = sda1 recovery = sda2 my external is sdb storage = sdb1 linux sdb2 GRUB is on sdb2's first sector. I tried coping it to grub.mbr on sda1 and added C:grub.mbr="ubuntu linux" all I get when selecting it is _ blinking and no booting. USB booting from BIOS works but I don't want family to have to mess with unplugging and replugging it when they want to boot to Windows. I also tried installing GRUB2 to MBR of sdb and copying same problem.
I'm unable to boot into my Windows OS so Im trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 on a separate partition, so I can somehow get access to the files on Windows.
I made a live cd and a flash USB, both of which when I try to boot from, will go straight to a blinking cursor and nothing else, it won't allow me to type and there are no error messages. So I can't even get the install started.
I made sure both the cd and flash USB are bootable from another pc from inside Windows.
I am trying to run Ubuntu from a live USB, everything seems to be great until I get to the part where the GUI should come up. Then I get this screen. It's a little hard to see, but it's basically a white bar at the top and black underneath. The black is flickering a lot and the flickering can stay for a short while (30-120 seconds) even after I have rebooted into windows. Sometimes the bar at the top is another solid color (purple,blue, orange, usually white though), I think it is putting my monitor in a strange version of it's self test.
When it is unplugged the monitor while cycle through full screens of different colors. I have tried Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop AMD64, 10.10 i386, and the latest Fedora to see if another distro had different results. I have also tried 2 other USB drives. I am using Universal USB Installer 1.8.0.8 to make the drives. My own searches have found some problems with graphic drivers for the GeForce 8800 GTX, but they a bit dated. I have tried adding vga=vesa to the boot arguments, I am not sure if I did it right or not, but it resulted in a black screen with a blinking line instead and no flickering.
System specs: AMD Phenom II 740BE (unlocked to Quad Core @ 3.4Ghz) ASRock Extreme3 870 WD Caviar Black 640GB 7200RPM 6.0Gb/s GSkill 4GB PC1600 GeForce 8800 GTX Dell 3007WFP
I installed Debian 7.2.0 (amd64) on a Toshiba Satellite C870D-121 with the graphic installer. It already has Windows 8.1 installed on another partition, and for Debian I'm not using the same partition of course. Actually, the Debian installation is replacing a Ubuntu 13.10 installation that was working fine.
After choosing Debian in the Grub menu, I can see the boot log entries adding and then the screen clears and all I get is a blinking cursor. After a while, some '^@^@^@' symbols appears. Of course I can Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a virtual Terminal in order to login and try to investigate the problem, but so far I haven't been able to reliably identify the problem.
I have a machine with Squeeze that currently boots from an USB thumb drive (that was the only drive on that box, referenced as SDA in /dev... Yep, no optical drive or HDD). I have installed an SSD on that machine. It is referenced a SDA, and the thumb drive has been nudged to SDB. I'd like to boot from the SSD and ditch the thumb.
I've partitioned and formatted the new Disk (ext4), created a swap file (to keep things simple, no swap partition), and used rsync -Sax / /media/USB0/ to clone the content of the root FS. I've edited the fstab file of the SSD to match the config (uuid of the drive, ext4 FS, swap file) then use grub-mkconfig -o /media/USB0/boot/grub/grub.cfg (I apt-get installed grub 2)
I've set the SSD as first boot device in the BIOS. Now when I boot from the SSD, all I get is a blinking cursor at the top of the screen (the thumb drive still boots fine). I guess I missed something .
I've been struggling with this for about 2 hours now (not the grub issue, the whole mess). I've tried googling this last problem, then searched this forum with no luck (I usually find stuff about people who want to boot from a drive other than the first one and must daisy-chain grub).
Bootloaders (and low level linux stuff) are new to me. I'm afraid to botch the bootloader of the thumb drive (grub 1.9x), and to be locked out of the machine.
I am having trouble booting the install CD for Fedora 15? As soon as I select a boot option I get a grey screen with a blinking cursor even if I pick the option to use basic video. I have tried using the intel_iommu=off parameter which makes no difference.
I also seem to have a similar issue when trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 on this machine too. I am using a Athlon x2 5200+, 5GB Ram, ATI 3850 if that's.
I use the command line frequently to navigate my files so I try not to have spaces in file names. Typically I have used an underscore to connect words but it was recently suggested that I should use a dash. Are there any disadvantages to using an underscore in file names?Should I switch to a dash? My system is running Xubuntu and I almost exclusively use the bash shell.
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
I have a Windows XP Dell laptop that completely froze the other day. I cannot start it up, and cannot even access safe mode -- it just goes to black screen with underscore in the upper left corner.
So, I did some searching and saw a recommendation to create a Ubuntu Live CD to run and access the info on the hard drive, at least. I have most of it backed up, but not the drivers and I know that will be a pain to redo. So, I am mostly hoping at this point to recover a little info off the drive before reinstalling the OS. Of course, if I could just fix it, that would be better...
I get an error message when I try to access the hard drive through Ubuntu that says it is in hibernation mode and I need to start windows and shut it down properly before Ubuntu can mount the drive. Since I can't get into Windows, this is impossible. It also said something about being able to mount it read-only.
I 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?
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.
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 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.
I am using Firefox 4. It came preinstalled with Linux Mint 11. I have added my own tweaked prefs.js (contains all about:config changes). Firefox 4 underscore spelling mistakes in red but I cant right click to auto correct them! I renamed .mozilla to .mozilla.old and started FF and this solved it. However is there another way to fix this? I have all my addons and about:config settings just as I like them and don't want to start all over again.
Full install of slackware. then i use these instructions to install drivers:
Quote:
Install nvidia driver in Slackware Linux
Before begin the nvidia driver installation, you must make a copy of the original /etc/X11/xorg.conf as a backup. Use the copy command example below:
If you choose to install the nvidia driver that you download from nvidia website, you must close kde or x-window and install the driver from Linux command line terminal.
Copy the driver to the directory that you placed all third party software such as /usr/local/src. This is not necessary, just a good habit. To install the driver, run the nvidia driver with the sh command like in the example below.
Now, you just need to answer all the questions to configure nvidia driver and the nvidia installation program will do the driver and kernel installation for you.
When i startx the computer freezes with an underscore in the top left hand of screen and i can't switch between tty's.
I know the pc and card work fine with other linux and win os's.
I 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.
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?
