Karmic totally wigging out on first boot

[northrup]

So I just performed a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10. Everything seemed to go perfectly fine until I tried to boot. After the initial Ubuntu logo, it jumped to a text-based login:

Ubuntu 9.10 marmot4 tty1

marmot4 login:

This would be fine, except that the text is all blinking erratically. The letters "hb" are also visible above "Ubuntu 9.10 marmot4 tty1".

It seems as if not only the text is blinking, but so is the connection between the OS and my keyboard. Only at certain times does a keypress actually register in the text-based login. Therefore, since there are no asterisks or anything to show how many letter's I've typed for a password, I have no way of logging on.

What could be causing this? Should I attempt a re-install?

[quixote]

Not that this is helpful, but I've had that happen when I was trying a karmic alpha or beta inside virtualbox. I tried to troubleshoot it, but got nowhere because, like you, I couldn't get it to do *anything*. I wound up reinstalling.

What computer do you have? How much memory, and what sort of graphics? Is this the first ubuntu version you've tried, or did it used to run on that machine?