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I've searched through the archives, but haven't found my specific problem yet. My apologies if this has been answered.

I upgraded 11.10 to 12.04 this morning and the install went fine I think. When I restarted, I got the purple screen with five dots and then a blank screen. If I hit Alt+Ctrl+F1 I get the login screen, but am stuck there.

I have Ubuntu dual booted with Windows 7 on a Samsung 9 laptop.

I am not a beginner, but I am a bit lost as to what to do next. I've seen a number of posts about Grub, but I am unsure if this applies to my case.

Any help is much appreciated!

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Not a GRUB problem, since it starts to boot. I've had this problem in the past due to video driver changes, usually when trying to install or, more likely, uninstall a proprietary driver and having some problem. The fix was very easy once I discovered the problem. I replaced the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the default. Last time it happened, there were several backups, named xorg.conf.xxxxx with xxxxx being backup names like original-1, fglrx-0, etc.

If you have backups dated before your upgrade, you could try renaming the current file, then copying one of the backups to the original name. You'll need to use sudo, of course, to do this.

The default with no proprietary driver is under 10 lines. I have one for AMD/ATI video, which you could use if you have that. If you have nVidia, I might be able to find one of them in my other computer.

I think you can generate this file by entering the command dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, but I haven't used that in a long time, so I'm not sure if it still works. Actually, I'm not 100% sure if it ever worked. :)

You can do this from a virtual terminal. Can't hurt anything if you're careful, and it beats reinstalling - something I rarely have done.

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The posts I think you're mentioning about Grub are likely trying to get you to disable the splash screen so you can see what the system is doing (or try to) when it stops booting.

  1. Hold left-Shift after BIOS (tapping is required on some laptops)
  2. With the first entry selected, press E to edit the boot settings.
  3. Remove the words splash and quiet from the linux line.
  4. ControlX to boot with those settings.

These settings will only run this boot so if you need to see the boot log in the future, you'll have to run through that again.

If you can get to a login prompt, that suggests the issue is graphical. Looking at /var/log/Xorg.0.log might be a good step to understand what's going wrong.

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I would try a fresh install from a cd or USB drive. my old Dell laptop messed up after restart. now I have to do a fresh install. its probably not necessary but from windows you could format the Ubuntu partition first.

UPDATE
As an alternative solution, maybe you don't need to format the partition. Perhaps you could just install a fresh longside copy and then copy what you need from the home folder in the old installation.

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