Hello,
I've been running Ubuntu for about two years on my old desktop. I'm running 12.04 currently. There have been some issues creeping up for the past few months that I've ignored.
When starting the computer I would get a warning about low battery voltage and pressing f1 to continue or f2 to fix or something rather. Anyway, I ignored and ignored that problem. Eventually, my computer would suddenly go into sleep mode when I was using it. So, I decided to try and fix the problem. I did some studying on line and the best diagnosis I could find was that there is a small battery on the motherboard that needs to be replaced. It is an 8 year old computer after all so I figured that was a good bet.
I replaced the battery to the motherboard and when starting up I no longer got the low battery voltage problem. Instead I got a new problem that seemed totally unrelated. I can't remember what it was but it also presented itself during startup and offered me the choice between f1 and continuing or f2 and diagnosing. Again, I would choose to continue.
The problem of the computer still going into sleep mode randomly persisted, though. Another thing I should add is that my computer was set up so that it could not be restored from sleep mode. So, every time it went into sleep mode I would have to do a hard shut down.
Doing more studying online I learned that that setting is in the BIOS. So, I went into my BIOS to allow myself to restore sessions from sleep mode without having to do a hard shut down. Another problem had happened though, possibly as a result of me playing with my voltage battery? I don't know, but the problem is that my entire BIOS was locked. I never set any password to lock the BIOS so I didn't know the password to unlock it, which would allow me to change the sleep mode settings.
So, I gave up on that for the time being. I would just continue to suffer with a computer that dies on me randomly until I got a new computer. 8 years is a life well lived anyways. I had backups of things just in case the computer died for good.
Well, eventually it did die for good, although I think it is only mostly dead. Now, when I fire up the computer it will bring me to my account log in. When I type in my password and hit enter, it will attempt to log me in, but instead a black screen with some sentences come up briefly, so quickly that I do not have time to read them, and then it returns me to the log in prompt again. It refuses to log me in, almost as if my password is no good.
Unfortunately, my backup was a little old, and there are just a few more files I'd like to extract from that computer if I could. I really just need a few more minutes of time on that computer and then I'm done.
Can anybody help me to log in and retrieve my files?
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