Laptop doesnt bot boot past grub, black screen with blinking cursor

[wardy277]

I booted up my laptop this morning but it refused to boot. Now this happens from time to time and just needs rebooting and all is well. But not on this case.

I have just Ubuntu 10.10 running so the only options in grub are all the ubuntu kernels and recovery options. No matter which ones i choose i always get the same result, a blinking cursor after a few seconds. I have tried running in recovery mode, i get a load of text then it stops. i have attached a few pictures as it stops at different times.

I have tried booting from live cd but that does the same, blinking cursor after the ubuntu boot menu (with the purple background).I have dried removing both the hard drives(it has to bays), unplugged everything usb, i even removed the wifi and the ram one by one.

I have tried running an old windows commander which did the same thing. Are there any wasy to get into the command line from a live cd? i cant even do ctrl+alt+f1.

Is my laptop completely broken?

Its a HP dv9700, 4Gb Ram, Nvidia graphocs card running Ubuntu 10.10

[wardy277]

Anyone any ideas?

[wardy277]

Bump

[altometer]

This happens to me when the boot device is slow.

1) where is Ubuntu installed?
2) how long have you allowed it to stay at this screen?
3) when did you install
4) What version of ubuntu did you install?
5) can you boot the live cd to command line?

[wardy277]

I have ubuntu installed in the primary hrive with a seperate partition for /home
I have tried leaving it at the screen or over an hour and it didnt change
I installed ubuntu over a year ago, i upgraded to 10.10 when it came out and it it has been working fine since. It even worked no problem the day before.
It is currently runnign Ubuntu 10.10 64Bit (as is the live cd)
I cannot boot to command line through the live cd. I tried advance options and removed the splash and quiet btu it get stuck as the same screen as booting from the disk

It wont even reboot with ctrl+alt+delete, same as any key combinations i can think of, it just does nothing.

[altometer]

Can you boot to mini-xp via hiren's boot cd?

Can you try the following;
1)Remove both Hard Drives
2)Change the bios settings to reflect this
3)Plug in a USB drive that is atleast 4 GB in size.
4)Attempt to boot to the live CD

If you have another computer, try re-downloading and burning a copy of the live CD.

[wardy277]

BINGO! Mini-Xp actualy booted!

It cant see the drives as they are both ext4 but the device manager does pick them both up under their correct model numbers

what can i do now to see why ubuntu didnt boot?

I have tried 2 dirrefent live cds that do worth on other pcs

[altometer]

okay, so mini xp booted. That "can" be telling us several things.

It's not the motherboard,cpu,memory,or a wierd fan issue.

Do you have another cd/dvd drive available?
What method was used to create your boot disc?

If possible, can you try creating a usb-install disc for ubuntu?
"use http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-mu...multiboot-usb/"

So far, I am not sure what is stopping you from being able to log into ubuntu, but we are working on getting you at least, in a linux environment.

[FoxEWolf]

Is this the first attempt booting up after install? It is a different problem if you were able to boot into 10.10 before, but if this is the first time it may just be the result of an error during installation. If possible try booting and restoring via LiveCD.

[wardy277]

Thanks for your help with this. I managed to boot into the mini xp via cd so i am sure the cd drive is fine, but just incase i did dig out an old laptop dvd drive and switched them, but only go the same message.

I tried booting, ubuntu, linux mint and damm small linux, all from usb, all of which failed in the same way.

I dont know if this effects anything, but i do remember before it breaking i was running ubuntu with a usb mouse, i put it intp standby. later i removed the usb mouse and then resumed ubuntu. it did work for a few hours fine but then when i turned it off (shutdown) and then booted up thats where i got the problem.

I have 3 usb ports on my laptop. When i boot the live cd and remove quiet and splash, i see the console output as in the pictures above. Every time it boots it seems to stop at [2.9...], but when i boot from usb and the usb is in the same usb port as the mouse was (probably coincidental) it gets to [3.0....] before frezing. I took the laptop apart and found out that this usb port was corrected by a 4 pin plug connecting to the motherboard. on a long shot i unplugged it and tried to boot but got the same issue.

oddly the above pictures are booting from the hdd which only got to [0.7...] but the live cd gets to [2.9...]. i guess these numbers represent boot levels? what happens at 3? is some sort of hardware activated?