11.04 boot stuck at "Checking battery status..."

[brec]

Was running 10.04; decided to upgrade to 11.10 via 10.10, 11.04 waypoints. With 10.04 I had ATI's proprietary video driver installed. After upgrade to 10.10, reboot stopped with thin-white-vertical-lines screen. Managed to get 10.10 desktop in low-graphics mode via grub. Upgraded to 11.04, got to its desktop same way. In 11.04 used AMD's recommended procedure to uninstall its driver. Rebooted. After ubunto-logo-with-sequenced-red-dots-underneath screen, got a text output screen of about a dozen lines looking like log output, starting with:
*Starting configure network device security [OK]
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.12
/dev/sda1: clean ...
[etc. -- nothing that looks alarming, and ending with:]
*Checking battery state... [OK]

where it seems to hang. I can get a terminal login prompt with Ctrl-Alt-F2, but what do I do after I log in?

[MAFoElffen]

Was running 10.04; decided to upgrade to 11.10 via 10.10, 11.04 waypoints. With 10.04 I had ATI's proprietary video driver installed. After upgrade to 10.10, reboot stopped with thin-white-vertical-lines screen. Managed to get 10.10 desktop in low-graphics mode via grub. Upgraded to 11.04, got to its desktop same way. In 11.04 used AMD's recommended procedure to uninstall its driver. Rebooted. After ubunto-logo-with-sequenced-red-dots-underneath screen, got a text output screen of about a dozen lines looking like log output, starting with:
*Starting configure network device security [OK]
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.12
/dev/sda1: clean ...
[etc. -- nothing that looks alarming, and ending with:]
*Checking battery state... [OK]

where it seems to hang. I can get a terminal login prompt with Ctrl-Alt-F2, but what do I do after I log in?

I'm out the door so don't have time for a long post. Hung at that message is a graphics driver problem. Hint- You had the driver installed but not it needs to be remove and compiled on a much newer kernel. Please go the my sticky:
Sticky: [all variants] Graphics Resolution- Upgrade /Blank Screen after reboot

Look at the bottom of Post #1 and look under the ATI Radeon notes. Theres instructions there on reinstalling ATI packaged drivers from the command line.Further detailed ATI instructions are linked from Post #2... For just about anything you might want to do.

Tell me how it goes.

[brec]

I'm out the door so don't have time for a long post. Hung at that message is a graphics driver problem. Hint- You had the driver installed but not it needs to be remove and compiled on a much newer kernel. Please go the my sticky:
Sticky: [all variants] Graphics Resolution- Upgrade /Blank Screen after reboot

Look at the bottom of Post #1 and look under the ATI Radeon notes. Theres instructions there on reinstalling ATI packaged drivers from the command line.Further detailed ATI instructions are linked from Post #2... For just about anything you might want to do.

Tell me how it goes.

(Heh, was reading your sticky when the thread subscription email announced itself and here you are!)

Sorry, don't understand "You had the driver installed but not it needs to be remove" (maybe "not" is a typo for "now" but still...) Did you notice that I said that in 11.04 I followed AMD's recommended procedure to UNinstall their driver? I'd rather not install ATI now, but rather wait until I do the upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10. I'm trying to boot 11.04 only in order to upgrade to 11.10.

Pending your return I'll do the fglrx purging steps from the sticky just in case AMD's uninstall procedure wasn't sufficient, and I'll check xorg.conf too.

Regardless, I'm puzzled as to why the startup should (apparently) hang after "Checking battery status..." rather than put up a blank or trash screen if it can't do graphics. But that's mere curiosity on my part.

Edit:
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx* # found nothing to remove
/etc/X11/xorg.conf is for a vanilla monitor with vesa
sudo service gdm start # already started
Ctrl-Alt-F7 displays the screen with the startup messages ending in "Checking battery status..."

[MAFoElffen]

(Heh, was reading your sticky when the thread subscription email announced itself and here you are!)

Sorry, don't understand "You had the driver installed but not it needs to be remove" (maybe "not" is a typo for "now" but still...) Did you notice that I said that in 11.04 I followed AMD's recommended procedure to UNinstall their driver? I'd rather not install ATI now, but rather wait until I do the upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10. I'm trying to boot 11.04 only in order to upgrade to 11.10.

Pending your return I'll do the fglrx purging steps from the sticky just in case AMD's uninstall procedure wasn't sufficient, and I'll check xorg.conf too.

Regardless, I'm puzzled as to why the startup should (apparently) hang after "Checking battery status..." rather than put up a blank or trash screen if it can't do graphics. But that's mere curiosity on my part.

Edit:
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx* # found nothing to remove
/etc/X11/xorg.conf is for a vanilla monitor with vesa
sudo service gdm start # already started
Ctrl-Alt-F7 displays the screen with the startup messages ending in "Checking battery status..."

Yes, my typo. Wife had already gone to bed and I had said I was on my way while I was posting.

Use a bootup option of "radeon.modeset=0" to boot

On your curiosity... This happens both with ATI Cards and NVideo cards. KMS tied into grub, the kernel and XServer... But ATI and nVidia have problems with that if the drivers are not installed and configured. If not installed, then we have to use the boot options to compensate.

Explaining this- Is sort of like a translator. It's less confusing if they know what language they need to translate, before what is needed to be translated just comes flooding in. I think it's like that for both these cards on VESA modes. They both can do VESA, if KMS is turned off and "put" into a VESA Mode. Both cards cannot do any of their proprietary graphics modes without a graphics driver.

On "removing": Yes I caught that you had removed the ATI proprietary driver.. The "repetitive" is for a problem that has showed up in the last 9 months where pieces and fragments of drivers have remained, then later conflicted with newly installed drivers. Some things don't install if it's told it already exists. Then while running it finds it's trying to run one part of a driver with another part that can't talk to each other. (poof). I try to incorporate all workarounds for those just-in-case's.

On why the "checking battery status" message... Could have been that message or "Checking System V Compatibility" or Black/Purple Screen or the Plymouth Splash (Purplish w/ Ubuntu and white/red dots)... All those are at a point where XServer starts, probes the video card, looks for a driver and tries to init the card in a graphics mode.

Between volunteering at a Computer Recycler/Computer Shop and doing dev testing. I do about 5 Linux Installs/Upgrades a day. My preference on release upgrades is to leave the graphics drivers installed, do the upgrade. Most of the time, if updates are applied before that, things are going to be okay. I know that sometimes a driver needs to recompile with a newer kernel, even on the same release. It's just one of those expected things.

[brec]

Not knowing what to do in 11.04 and the aim of the whole exercise being to get to 11.10, I went ahead and upgraded to 11.10 via the console; I figured whatever the solution was I could apply once I got to 11.10.

The 11.10 boot ended the same was as originally reported above for 11.04. I hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 and applied this procedure to reinstall and reconfigure xserver (I had previously purged fglrx). On reboot I was presented with a GUI login and then with the 11.10 Unity desktop.

Now onward to (re)installing the ATI driver/software...

MAFoElffen, I guess you posted above while I was composing this one. Thanks for your help!