Black screen with blinking cursor

**Tom_McClintock** · March 29th, 2014

Originally Posted by westie457

With an ethernet cable connected boot using the USB stick into 'Try' Mode. Go to here. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair and follow the 2nd option.

When BootRepair is running click the 'Advanced' button, say no to any repairs and yes to generate a Boot Report.

Post the link here so we can have a look at what might be wrong.

Edit: Forget about the advanced options, just go for the 'Create Bootinfo Summary' button.

Once boot repair opened, it said "EFI Detected. Please check options." Is that normal?

The link it provided me was http://paste.ubuntu.com/7174244/

**JKyleOKC** · March 29th, 2014

Those results from "mount" seem to indicate that it's not even discovering your actual hard drive, which should show up as "/dev/sda1" in one of the entries, just as "/dev/sdb1" shows up on the 7th line of the listing. Apparently, your hard drive is partitioned with the "gpt" rather than the "legacy" method, and consequently the installation of Ubuntu didn't actually work.

I've managed to install on such a hard drive but it's been a while. I'll leave the details to squakie and bookrt since I don't remember exactly how I managed it and leaving a detail out could create even more confusion, but I do know that the Samsung implementation of EFI was/is a bit flaky and that in a dual-boot situation, both systems must boot in the same mode. If you can run the "Boot Repair" program as suggested, it will show a lot more detail -- but don't tell it to fix things until some of the experts here have looked it over, because it's possible it could make things worse.

**Tom_McClintock** · March 29th, 2014

Originally Posted by squakie

A quick lspci | grep VGA should provide a small amount of output that would be useful for us as well, so if you can get this far, please post back the ouput.

Please post back those results.

From with the try mode, I opened Terminal and typed lspci | grep VGA and this is what came up:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216M [GeForce GT 330M] (rev a2)

**Tom_McClintock** · March 29th, 2014

Originally Posted by JKyleOKC

Those results from "mount" seem to indicate that it's not even discovering your actual hard drive, which should show up as "/dev/sda1" in one of the entries, just as "/dev/sdb1" shows up on the 7th line of the listing. Apparently, your hard drive is partitioned with the "gpt" rather than the "legacy" method, and consequently the installation of Ubuntu didn't actually work.

I've managed to install on such a hard drive but it's been a while. I'll leave the details to squakie and bookrt since I don't remember exactly how I managed it and leaving a detail out could create even more confusion, but I do know that the Samsung implementation of EFI was/is a bit flaky and that in a dual-boot situation, both systems must boot in the same mode. If you can run the "Boot Repair" program as suggested, it will show a lot more detail -- but don't tell it to fix things until some of the experts here have looked it over, because it's possible it could make things worse.

Not sure why the windows partition is still showing. Windows has been removed from my understanding.

Sorry for my complete lack of ignorance in this matter.

**JKyleOKC** · March 29th, 2014

Your Boot Repair report confirms the EFI-legacy conflict. I'll leave the "how to fix it" advice to others but will be keeping an eye on this thread in case I can help any more...

**JKyleOKC** · March 29th, 2014

Originally Posted by Tom_McClintock

Not sure why the windows partition is still showing. Windows has been removed from my understanding.

That "windows" partition is, I believe, just the description for the CDROM partition it discovered, and means that it is "legacy" formatted. Only the partitions identified as "/dev/sda*" in the Boot Repair reports are on your actual hard drive, which is formatted entirely as "gpt" now.

No need to apologize for not yet being expert on a new-to-you system. I've been working with this stuff longer than most people here have been alive, and still haven't reached "expert" status on all of it!

**Tom_McClintock** · March 29th, 2014

after running boot repair, it now seems to be working!

Let me play around to make sure. While I wanted to run 13.10, I'm a little worried of trying if this works. Is there a big difference?

**JKyleOKC** · March 29th, 2014

Since 14.04, which will be another Long Term Support version, is due out in just a couple of weeks, I'd not bother with 13.10. There's always fairly significant differences between one release and the next, but the basic feel won't change much...

**bookrt** · March 30th, 2014

Glad this is finally working! I would say that you have worked this hard to get it running, now don't fix what ain't broke! I agree with JKyleOKC, wait until 14.04. You should be able to upgrade from within your current install (but back up your data before you do so).