8.04 to 10.04 and now screen / display unusable

[tanndo]

Hi,
Had XP dual boot with ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
Decided to upgrade to 10.04 "in place" over the
internet.
All seemed ok but now after the grub menu, screen is all wavy / fuzzy / flickering, like "white noise" on an untuned telly.
So much so that I can't even see the login box to login.
Googled and tried a few things: I still seem to be on grub 1 and I editied the kernel line with e to remove "quiet splash". Tried replacing
with :
nomodeset
i915.modeset=1
i915.modeset=0
xforcevesa
before pressing return and doing b to boot.
Tried all 4 above one at a time and made no differnce: display /screen is still unreadable so can't login. Tried recovery option but made no difference.
Think I have the G33/G31 onboard video (gigabyte mobo).
Tried booting from my 8.04 CD (try ubuntu) and this still works
fine. Can still use grub to boot into XP also.
Please help as I'm running out of things to try !
Cheers
T

[tanndo]

Just burn't the 10.04 iso and booted from CD.
Exactly the same issue so it wasn't the upgrade
over 8.04 that caused the problem.
Any ideas ?

[tanndo]

just an update, the display is not really white noise but more like horizontal purple wavy lines, with a white band (some white wavy lines) in the mddle.
Is there any way to force ubuntu to boot to e.g. video failsafe defaults ?

[tanndo]

man, last night was a late one but at least I can now login !
Had to set nomodeset on grub kernel line to enable
me to get tty working (ctrl-alt-f1)
From here I could add nomodetest to /boot/grub/menu.lst
permanently.
Finally to get X display working used failsafe xorg.conf
with vesa driver.
For more details see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes
Workaround B
and
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/ReleaseNotes#Working%20around%20bugs%20in%20the%20 new%20kernel%20video%20architecture

Still I can't believe you can release an OS when it doesn't support a complete family of intel video chipsets. Ok so the release notes mentioned 8xx but not my chipset.

Can you imagine the outcry if microsoft did this!

At the very least I would have expected the upgrade process
to warn me and/or configure itself to a working system.

I'm still wondering wether to stick with ubuntu given the
official (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes#Workaround%20B:%20Switch%20to%20-vesa)
prognosis:

"...this regresses a lot of functionality: No 3D hw acceleration, no accelerated video, no HD resolutions, poor external monitor support. Probably other issues too."

Come on guys and gals, this just isn't good enough?
T

[Elmer Fudd]

It sounds like you just did an online upgrade. I think that after reading about you issue that I will always try a live CD to check compatibility before doing a version upgrade.
Thanks for keeping the tread going- even with no responses

[tanndo]

yes thats a very good point!
If i'd checked first with a live CD I would have seen the
issue and been forewarned. Oh well next time.