Boots to blank screen with cursor. How screwed am I?

[NinjaSpaz]

I am a complete Linux newbie and I tried installing the latest release candidate (10.04) as a dual boot with Windows XP. The install seemed to go fine and it said it needed to reboot to finish the install. It rebooted and then displayed a series of errors on a DOS-like screen (which I wish I wrote down). When I realized that it was definitely hung, I then held the power button to shut it off. After that, all it does is boot to up to a blank/black screen with a cursor.

The box is old and I was actually going to throw it away, but I figured this was a good opportunity to give Linux a try. At this point, I'm willing to go to either Windows or Ubuntu... I don't really care which. I actually just want to recover some files on the box.

Any ideas on next steps? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

[limey_rick]

Have you tried booking the Live CD? If you can, boot the 10.04 Live CD, or get a 9.10 Live CD and boot this.

Once you've booted this, follow some of the steps here to see if its because GRUB installed on the wrong disk or something else.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr...ing%20GRUB%202

Please provide some more information about the number of disks on your machine. Just one, or multiple?

[grege]

If nothing else use a Live CD and a USB stick to recover the files you need to save - and do it before you try anything else.

[NinjaSpaz]

Thanks for your help. Yeah, I actually tried that today (before seeing your posts) and was able to boot successfully from the CD and access the files (which is great).

Oddly enough, without changing anything, I can now boot to the screen where I can select an OS. When I select Ububtu (the default), I see the following error:

There is a problem with the configuration server.
(/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status 256)

Then, once I get in, I see the following in the upper-right:

The configuration defaults for Gnome Power Manager have not been installed correctly. Please contact your administrator.

I tried a few things, but I was unable to get past this. I'm going to install 9.1 over this to see if that works.

- James -

[NinjaSpaz]

I installed 9.1 last night. Everything seemed to go fine with the install. It booted up and went right to Ubuntu and I was able to browse around for a little bit. Then, Firefox crashed after installing a Flash plug-in and I couldn't get Firefox to open back up, so I reset. After a reset (and all susequent resets) I now see that same strange login screen as below with the same error:

The configuration defaults for Gnome Power Manager have not been installed correctly. Please contact your administrator.

Any ideas to get around this? If so, please speak slowly, because I'm a complete Linux newbie.

[saliflo]

it's not grub problem