Ubuntu 11.04 not loading

fire_munki

fire_munki

fire_munki

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Joined
25 Jun 2005
Posts
1,092
Hi all,
I was trying out some DVD ripping programs yesterday, put the PC into standby now this morning it won't load.
It starts by showing the boot menu to choose what to load, select the normal install and it goes to the purple screen with ubuntu written on it.
From here it goes to a blank screen where the CPU revs up to max and then down. It does this until I power off.

Any ideas how I fix my install? I don't want to format/reinstall cos there are some pics i've not put on the 1TB drive yet. I also don't want to reinstall as that seems a damn inelegant solution without any skill or learning.

I can take a vid if it helps of what it does.
 
What kind of hardware are you running? Are you using a proprietary graphics driver that doesn't support KMS and if so have you tried adding nomodeset to the grub boot line? Have you by any chance updated your kernel recently?

By root shell prompt, do you mean a non graphical login? Can you get in with your usual user credentials from the prompt? I've not used ubuntu for a long time, have you tried logging in (non graphically) and firing up gdm?
 
I'm sorry budda but what you said went mostly over my head!
The drivers hadn't changed nor had had I changed the kernal recently. The major update was a while ago.
Root shell prompt was one of the option from the recovery menu that loaded from the grub loader.
I've no idea what gdm is or how to fire it up.
I'm a total beginner to Linux.
 
Ok no worries, could you try bringing up the root shell prompt and logging in with your normal username and password. Once you're in enter (without the quotation marks of course) "sudo xinit", it'll probably ask for a password, just enter your password. If that works it should be pretty straightforward to fix, if not, let me know at what point it fails.
 
Great your xserver is fine then, can you post the results of "dmesg | tail" "lsmod" "lspci" and "glxinfo | grep direct" for me (when you're in the graphical terminal that is)?

Are you familiar with grub (your bootloader)?
 
vaguely familar with grub.
But here I'm gonna sound stupid, how on earth do I get it to input the vertical line? Ctrl alt displays ¦ on this XP machine but nothing displays on the linux box.
 
got it, now, anything in particular you want from the results?
Its a lot of writing and copying over will prob involve a spelling mistake.

glxinfo was the shortest and tells me its not installed
 
Shift and the button left of z on your keyboard, unless it's a yank keyboard and then it's shift and the button left of 1 (its been a while since i dealt with an american keyboard, i could be wrong). It's called a pipe in linux and it is literally one of the best things about unix/linux based operating systems :)
 
I was kinda wanting to see it all, lsmod lists your loaded modules (think of them like DLL files or maybe even drivers), lspci is to see your hardware, and glxinfo | grep direct was to see if you have direct rendering. Dont suppose you have a camera or something you could take a shot of the screen with?

[edit] if you dont have it installed it would be good if you could, it's probably sudo apt-get install mesa-utils (probably, haven't touched ubuntu in a long time)
 
you sir are a leg-end.
Up and back to my desktop.
Will have a play around.
Anything else need to be done?
Also in the spirit of learning what, if simple to explain, did you get me to do?
 
You definitely will need to play around, something is choking your boot sequence, this is why i despise graphical loaders like the ones you get with ubuntu. If you can edit your grub menu.lst (or whatever it is in grub2) try adding nomodeset at the end of your kernel line, if that doesn't help you get there I'll hop back on here tomorrow when im not drunk lmao
 
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