Black screen at boot

**shantzoo** · March 26th, 2010

Hello.

I have a "little" problem with ubuntu and it freaks me out. I hope someone can help me solve it.
So, the problem is that _sometimes_ (I'd say around 5-10% of the time) when booting ubuntu, right after the splash screen (that pulsing white ubuntu logo on a black background), when normally GDM should pop in, I get a black screen and it stays like that and I have to reboot the machine. This is very annoying because I get this behaviour sometimes 3-4 times in a row...
Also, sometimes (maybe half of the times when I get that black screen) the HDD LED on my laptop remains lit and the caps lock LED flashes.
Right now I'm using a clean install of ubuntu 9.10, but I had the exact same problem with a 9.04 install and a 9.04 to 9.10 upgrade (so I had 9.04, I had the problem, I then upgraded to 9.10, the problem remained, and then I did a fresh install of 9.10 and the problem is still there).

My hardware is a Asus X51RL laptop, with a dual core CPU, 2GB Ram and a ATI X1100 video board. I also could paste a copy of any log you want me to, to help you identify the problem (but it would probably take some time for me to get that black screen, and also I hope that the logs remain saved after I do a hard reboot).

**nightwolf2k5** · March 26th, 2010

Hope this helps:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/BlankScreen

Good Luck.

**shantzoo** · March 26th, 2010

Thanks for your reply.
As far as I can see, all the solutions posted on the link you provided, seem to be for people, for which this blank screen appears all the time, whereas for me, it only happens some of the time.
My guess is that this isn't a configuration issue but rather either a hardware issue (maybe some device doesn't function properly some of the time) or a bug in the OS.

Edit: also, I have a dual boot set up with windows 7, and on windows 7 I never get any such issue, so I guess it would be ubuntu related.