I am trying to boot Ubuntu on my computer. When I boot my computer it boots to a black screen. How can I fix this?
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If you are trying to install Ubuntu1. Ensuring your CD/DVD or USB flash drive burned/written correctly and not damaged:
2. Black/purple screen when you try to boot the LiveCDThe Ubuntu installer's startup portion is sometimes incompatible with certain graphics cards. Fixing it and getting to the Ubuntu Desktop to try or install it can often be surprisingly easy fix: the
You can also try Black/purple screen after you boot Ubuntu for the first timeThis usually happens because you have an Nvidia or AMD graphics card, or a laptop with Optimus or switchable graphics, and Ubuntu does not have the proprietary drivers installed to allow it to work with these. The solution is to boot Ubuntu once in
If you are running Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10, and have a ATI/AMD graphics card, you have to follow the instructions here, otherwise you will run into this problem every time you restart your computer.
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If an update or something else caused your boot problem:
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If your system is dual boot:Link up the following:
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If your graphics card is Nvidia, follow these steps:
If your graphics card is ATI, follow these steps:
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I had this problem last night. All of a sudden my system wouldn't boot up anymore. BIOS check would finish, then it would just hang there on a black screen with the cursor flashing. Left it there for several hours just in case. When that didn't work, I unplugged all my USB devices and all of a sudden it booted up fine again. I haven't narrowed it down exactly, but in my case it was either my USB hub or the iPod plugged into that USB hub that was causing it to hang. Not saying this is necessarily the problem you're having, but hope your boot problem is as easy to fix as unplugging some USB devices...! |
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I also had this problem, or a similar one. It turned out that, for some reason, Ubuntu had started with the screen brightness on its lowest setting. If I went into a very dark room, I could see the screen just well enough to go to the "Brightness and Lock" control panel and turn the brightness up to where it should be. |
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If your experiencing a black screen after boot on an HP pavilion laptop try increasing the screen brightness with the F3 button first! My laptop always boots to a completely black screen and one tap of F3 and all is well. |
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If you are using the Windows Installer (Wubi)Wubi overrides are identical to normal installs except the first time you reboot after running the installer in Windows. To complicate things, since Ubuntu 11.10 there are two distinct methods to install with Wubi. The first way is using the Desktop ISO, which applies to all sub-flavours (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mythbuntu etc.) and also if you downloaded the Ubuntu ISO yourself. The second method is using a pre-installed disk-image, if you run Method 1 You'll see this:
Press Esc and then you see this:
Ignore Safe graphic mode as it applied to Ubuntu in 2008 and does nothing for the modern nvidia/radeon issue. Place your cursor on Normal mode and press E. Then edit the entry and insert
Now press Ctrl+X to boot. NOTE: This only applies to the Installation; the next time you boot you have to override it again, and for this it will be the same as for a normal install (answered above). Make sure you hold Shift to make the Grub menu show though. Method 2
When you run
Note - if you've come to this thread after booting for the first time, it's possible that the Note also that the Grub Menu is suppressed by default on Wubi installs (even though there are two operating systems - because you boot Ubuntu from Windows, and therefore adding a Windows entry from Ubuntu's Grub Menu makes no sense) so you have to press and hold the Shift key after selecting Ubuntu in order to display the Grub Menu. On Windows 8, it reboots after you elect to boot into Wubi, in which case, you should hold the Shift key after the BIOS posts. (This is only for Windows 8 with BIOS - Wubi doesn't work with UEFI). |
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If Ubuntu 10.04 booted, but not 10.10 or newer versions bootedChances are your computer's ACPI is not supported. Ubuntu 10.04 supported drivers for the ACPI, but dropped supported for that since 10.10. To try that, change the BootOptions to If it worked, you have 2 options to make the LiveCD boot:
Different PC manufacturers have different BIOSes, so read your computer's manual if your computer's BIOS doesn't show up. |
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On my notebook I had funny problem. I thought I had black screen two times and I had to shut down it with button. Shortly before I tried again and I barely saw some dark letters in the center of the screen so I pressed the button which brightens up the screen and now it works :) |
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Turns out I had to create a LiveCD and completely reinstall GRUB. After I did this, things are working fine again. Documentation for re-installing grub is here : help.ubuntu.com. |
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This one helped at least a bit: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9965194&postcount=8 In summary:
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If you have more than one video port on your graphics card (or more than one graphics card), then plugging the monitor into a different port may fix the problem. I've had an issue in the past with dual-DVI graphic cards, where it won't boot using one of the ports (secondary maybe?), but works fine on the other port. |
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I realize this is an old question, but it's also pretty general without any details about the specific hardware involved. That said, you can't file a bug or go about fixing things until you figure out some more details. I thought I'd take a stab at this since I faced the issue and recovered from it pretty recently. I'll probably run through here again later and throw in some more info and simplify the steps, but the answer list is already pretty big, so I'll go easy on the screenshots. Recovery mode is your friend, but you don't always need a single-user root session to solve things. In fact, you might just be able to do a normal console login by selecting "resume" without considering any of the other options on the recovery menu. The nice thing about a normal console session over the single-user root mode is that you can get multiple terminals running at once--Switch between them or open up new ones with Alt+F1, Alt+F2, etc. There's a good chance that it's a video driver issue which is preventing you from going into the graphical login, and it might just be a result of some upgrade you did before rebooting the computer. You might go a couple of years at a time without experiencing similar issues, but it's a good idea to know your hardware and to be prepared to use the terminal. Basically there are two video drivers to worry about: the kernel driver and the xorg driver. Xorg is a video server that uses the x11 protocol to display things in full color with depth and all kinds of crazy effects--It's an abstraction layer between applications like the desktop environment or windowing managers and the kernel driver. The kernel driver is yet another abstraction layer, but it's a bit closer to communicating with the actual hardware. It's the kernel's job (in this case, Linux) to pass messages between applications and the hardware. The drivers can either be compiled into the kernel or added in a more ad hoc way through kernel modules. Probably you're using modules unless you configured and compiled your own custom kernel. The kernel driver as a module gets loaded shortly after you boot up, which allows for easier upgrades when you power down to swap out a card. The good news is that there are some more or less standard tools that you can run from the command line to give you more information about those kinds of drivers, the actual hardware and whether they're loading: lspci, dmidecode and dmesg, to name a few. There are man pages (e.g., Then there are the xorg drivers. To list what's available in the repositories, you might type If you upgraded an Xorg driver without directly upgrading Xorg itself, there's a chance that reverting to the old driver via Now that I've given an overview of some directions to start with troubleshooting, let's get back to the console screen that you hopefully pulled off without a hitch from choosing "resume" at the recovery menu. It's a pain to be stuck without a mouse at the console when you've got a lot of copying and pasting to do, so prepare yourself with some gpm for mouse support and some other tools: links/links2 or w3m (web browsers), vim (text editor), dpkg, apt, less (vim style keys and searching like man), and grep. I'm probably leaving a few out. Some particularly useful commands for dpkg are Unless you've got an Nvidia card or something with proprietary driver support for linux that you want to try, I'd shy away from kernel drivers before trying things with xorg--Try troubleshooting the xorg drivers first because it can be a lot easier than customizing a kernel for hardware (depending on the brand). The thing is that you might wind up following a series of links that lead you in the wrong direction, with chip makers sending you to the card makers and card makers giving you no support. As for trying out different kernels for different "vanilla" versions of the driver, stick with kernel versions that aren't far off from your current one (given by Good luck! |
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It appears as we both share the same hardware. At least the same CPU, The same P67 and the same video card (Mine is a GT 440). What you can do is the following:
Now if you happen to have any problems do the following via the terminal again but this time go to your home folder. In my case it is
Then when you boot into Ubuntu change the resolution via the Displays option in the Ubuntu Settings Menu (The cog in the upper right corner) What we did there was remove the monitors.xml to solve some resolution problems, remove the .nvidia-settings to fix some Nvidia config problems and remove the xorg.conf (Which is not really needed in the latest Ubuntu versions) to remove any badly configured options. |
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I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 to 12.04 LTS, and when 12.04 loaded for the first time, I had a blank screen after the GRUB menu. It actually booted fine - I could SSH into the system as usual, but the video at the actual console didn't work. Booting into recovery mode worked fine, too. Here was the solution. Hardware = Macbook, early 2008, Macbook4,1. (Black - Early 2008/Penryn) After much trial and error, the solution was the editing and updating GRUB as shown below. The relevant edits were
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I have had this problem a few times. I occasionally get errors detecting one of the HDDs, and I think the boot order gets corrupted in the BIOS. Fixing the boot order solves the boot problem. I have an old Nov 2005 ASUS mobo with a 750 GB WD and a 1.5TB Samsung hard disk. |
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UBUNTU 12.04 LTS install Problem, stuck/crash at loading screen. (Nvidia Graphics Cards)
Turn on computer and select the recovery option from the GRUB menu then boot normally.
PS I am not sure if you can place graphics card into PC after installation this is the way it worked for me and I am passing it on. I might suggest trying to install the graphics card on step 1 with machine off first as it is much safer this way. Very Respectfully, Matthew Kaulfers |
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I had this issue with Ubuntu 12.04 64bit version. I install all goes well, I enable the Nvidia drivers reboot and nothing but a black screen. I re-installed several times with the same results. I then remembered that I had this problem with previous versions of Ubuntu. I downloaded and installed the 32bit version then installed the Nvidia drivers and I did not have this issue. It only happens when I use the 64bit version with the Nvidia drivers. |
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When the grub boot menu comes up, press e to edit the correct boot line. Where it says If this works, then you can install proprietary graphics drivers which should get you going again. If you have trouble with the above, you can change the above line permanently in the grub configuration file. Boot into recovery mode (selection from the grub boot loader) and edit the file You can edit this file by typing:
You'll have to update the grub menu:
then reboot by typing
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I tried those methods as well -- no joy. Here's what did worked for me. Here's the part that was useful: Getting 1366x768 resolution Create file
and execute:
In file
Execute:
reboot, now you have 1366x768 resolution. Actually, I already had this resolution. But the added commands got rid of the black screen on boot-up and the need to switch video modes. |
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If you installed from a USB drive, check whether it boots with the flash drive plugged in and if so, this may help. |
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Since you said that you upgraded, I would try doing a clean install. Obviously this is not an ideal solution, but considering that you are having problems at this point after an upgrade it would be the route I would take. This again does not really identify the problem, or really fix it, but if it has to do with the upgrade process, then it essentially side steps it. |
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protected by Community♦ Apr 28 at 20:37
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