11.10 PAE kernel doesn't boot

[cripkd]

I've upgraded from 10.10 to 11.10 and the system hangs upon booting at the 4 blinking loading dots step.
I've discovered I can still boot into the old 2.x kernel from the Previous OS option in grub and I can also boot the 3.x kernel from there.
The only difference seems to be that the default kernel is the PAE version.
Am i missing something with this kernel? I don't have more than 4gb of RAM (i have 4 in fact). Is there any way I can make this the default so that I don't have to be around when the computer boots to go into grub manually?
Thanks.

[faltor]

I am having the same issue.
Any help would be appreciated.

[dsuh]

I just had and fixed this problem on my upgrade.
The problem is that older computers can not run the PAE kernel.
When I used the Update Manager to upgrade, it did not notice that I was using a non-PAE kernel and went ahead to make the PAE kernel the default on boot.

On boot hit <ESC> at the grub boot screen to boot into the non-PAE 3.0.0 kernel (3rd one from top).

Go to terminal and get into root:
sudo -i

cd /boot/grub

Use your editor (nano, vi, etc.) to edit menu.lst

On first page, edit the "default" value to "2"

This corresponds to the kernel you want to boot by default listed at the bottom half of the file starting from 0 for the first one.

[tom-ubuntu]

Startup Manager can also help in case you have to select another default kernel (and much more). I had the same issues and went with this solution.

sudo apt-get install startupmanager