why won't 10.04 boot?

[stef-l]

Well I've been tearing my hair out all day with this one. Followed various strands and posts & tried a lot of things but no joy.
(I have dual boot with XP SP3)
Last night upgraded from 8.04 to 10.04 using update manager, so I don't have a CD. Worked fine till the very end of the install, but 10.04 will not boot - I get 'starting up' black screen, flash of green screen & then it all hangs - black screen, sometimes flashing cursor, sometimes frozen cursor.

It loaded 10.04 once, and the system worked.
It wouldn't turn off - just hanging splashscreen.
So had to power off.

Thought it was a graphics card issue (nvidia 6200) but it isn't.

From variosu advice have been trying to tweak the grub screen with 'nomodeset' but this hasn't had any effect. Partly instructions I've been reading haven't been clear, and it doesn't seem possible to get the grub screen to save the 'nomodeset' instruction.

I have discovered that if I boot from my live 8.04 CD I can access the drive and the files on which 10.04 is installed.

Can anyone help me out of this madness? When it works I love ubuntu, but every upgrade I've ever tried has been frustrating; I don't want to have to go back to XP which drives me nuts

Please help

stef-l

[Rup.Xamqon]

I had the very same problem - Dell XPS M1330, Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS graphics card, upgraded from 9.10 to 10.04, same result: no booting possible. After hitting several Ctrl-Alt-Del and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and Enter's somehow Lucid started - don't ask me how...

Searching around I started meddling with Grub:
sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

I found the following two lines:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=792 splash quiet"

Someone suggested deleting "quiet splash" and replacing by "nomodeset". That did not work for me. What worked was commenting the second line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="vga=792 splash quiet"

It seems that my card does not like "vga=792".

BTW, thanks to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1446132 I fixed my boot screen resolution:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x800x32

and editing /etc/grub.d/00_header as suggested there.

[stef-l]

when I explored the 10.04 files after booting via the live 8.04 CD I was looking for lines like this in GRUB but did not find anything like them. There seemed to be several different folders under GRUB, numbered 00, 10, 20, 30, 40 and I looked in all of them

I will have yet another look - quite honestly I am prepared to try anything

stef-l

[oldfred]

I think you were looking in the wrong place.
GRUB 2 has three main parts:

1. /etc/default/grub - the file containing GRUB 2 menu settings.
2. /etc/grub.d/ - the directory containing GRUB 2 menu creating scripts.
3. /boot/grub/grub.cfg - the GRUB 2 configuration file, not editable.

You need to look at /etc/default/grub, a file with config settings. The vga=XXX has been obsoleted so you have to change as Rup.Xamqon commented.

[jplinderman]

Since you mentioned NVIDIA and a blank screen, I had a similar problem. I'd do a grub boot, wait a few seconds, and then my ASUS screen would report NO DVI SIGNAL. I had to do the NVIDIA driver install via

System > Administration > Hardware drivers

but that can (as far as I know) only be done via gui (as root). No drivers, no gui, no gui, no drivers. I eventually installed a VGA card long enough to boot, login as root, and run the above sequence. After that, the DVI input worked fine upon boot. A good indication that this is the problem is that you may hear the Ubuntu login "music" even though your screen is blank. -- jpl

[nitstorm]

<Sorry, dumb post>

[stef-l]

Right - I think somehow thanks to everyone's suggestions, I have managed to update the grub and can now load 10.04!! - now I also need to ask why 10.04 won't shut down!
It gets as far as the splashscreen & then hangs, so I have to power off, which obviously isn't good.

Any thoughts?

Many thanks for everyone's patience

stef-l

[sergik128]

I have similar problem but trying to boot from Live CD (I haven't tried to install it yet). Just a low-res screen with Ubuntu logo with five dots and then monitor goes to sleep. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't help, so I have to power down my PC.

My configuration:
Asus P6T, Core i7 920 (no overclock), 6Gb Corsair, ATI Radeon 5850 (Asus, no overclock)

- I checked CD for errors in Ubuntu 10.04 menu (no errors)
- I checked RAM for errors in Ubuntu 10.04 menu (no errors)
- I tried nomodeset option alone and several others from F6 menu (didn't help)
- I tried the same CD on my very old Pentium M laptop and my other Core 2 Duo desktop and it worked fine.
- I tried Ubuntu's previous 9.10 Live CD on the same machine and it worked fine.

I burnt CD using native capability of Win7 as advised by Ubuntu howto page.

So I don't really know what to do next... I probably won't be trying to install it until this and other issues (with grub config and loading to another OS) are resolved...

[stef-l]

well thought it was all sorted, but no! 10.04 won't always load, sometimes it will and other times it just hangs exactly as I described earlier..

I wish someone had a clear idea what I could do

I don't think having to use power off so often is helping the system either.

At the moment I have a ubuntu that's worse than useless: don't know if it will boot,and can't turn it off properly if it does...

does bill gates really have to win?

stef-l (getting very fed up now)

[frantid]

can you run the bootinfo script and put the results here inside code tags.

http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/