I run a compaq presario cq61 with a HD radeon 4200 and the open-source drivers. Occasionally Ubuntu 12.10 will not boot and I have to go to recovery mode. I then thought I should switch to the proprietary drivers, but because the legacy drivers are not supported in ubuntu 12.10, I followed the procedure highlighted above (with ppa:makson96/fglrx-legacy).
It did not work at all. The system would hang on a black screen when I tried to boot. The usual trick of setting radeon.modeset=0 would not work. I had to go to recovery mode, drop to root shell, purge the fglrx-legacy package and reinstall xorg to restore a working system.
At least, as a newbie in Ubuntu, this gave me a nice training opportunity!!
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