Possible Duplicate:
My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it?
I have a fresh install of Ubuntu on my laptop. This MAY be a duplicate question, by my situation seems to be slightly different from other people who are/were experiencing similar issues so I thought it would be best to open a new question. It is similar to this question, but not exactly the same.
I also want to preface this with the knowledge that I am a Linux noob. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop with the express purpose of learning Linux. That being said I am a Computer Sciences major and have worked in IT for years, just entirely in a Windows environment. So while I am pretty computer...savvy in general, I don't know much in the way of *nix command line commands and such.
Anyways, I installed Ubuntu from the Live CD. I did run into some trouble installing it where I would get a black blinking cursor, but was able to get around it by setting the nomodeset
parameter (similar to what is referenced in the first answer to the question I linked above).
So anyways, got it installed, worked great, grabbed all the updates from the Ubuntu Software center, grabbed a few updates, practiced using SSH to get into my Linux account in my school's computers, etc etc.
But now issue is I intermittently get the same black blinking cursor option on bootup. It makes it to the OS selection screen every time, but sometimes it will boot up fine, other it hangs on the black screen with blinking cursor after I choose an OS to boot into. Can't seem to figure out what the determining factor is. If it happens, I just manually reboot 2 or 3 times until it goes away, but it really is frustrating, and a bit worrisome because (and this could be my imagination) but it seems to be increasing in frequency. For example, I have gotten one successful boot out of 7 attempts while writing this on my desktop.
I got the impression from the linked question above, and from a few other forum posts, that this is usually caused by a graphics card driver incompatibility with ATI or Nvidia graphics cards, and that that's where the nomodeset
parameter comes in. HOwever, my laptop is using integrated Intel graphics. Also, in my experience, driver incompatibilities, especially ones that stop your computer from booting, aren't usually intermittent. Either they work or they don't manually rebooting a few times doesn't make the problem temporarily go away.
Also I did try setting the nomodeset
parameter by pressing 'e' on the OS selection screen, and it still hung up, though this time it hung up on a purple screen, no text. The next time I tried it with nomodeset
I got a bunch of text and it hung up on:
[0.305025] NMI watchdog enabled, takes one hw-pmu counter. [0.305129] Booting node 0, Processors #1 [0.424438] NMI watchdog enabled, takes one hw-pmu counter. [0.424542] #2 [0.532213] NMI watchdog enabled, takes one hw-pmu counter. [0.532320] #3
I also tried booting into (recovery mode) and it made it to:
[0.305025] NMI watchdog enabled, takes one hw-pmu counter. [0.305129] Booting node 0, Processors #1 [0.424438] NMI watchdog enabled, takes one hw-pmu counter. [0.424542] #2
The only thing that struck me as being out of sorts during the boot was the line:
[0.312575] PEBS disabled due to CPU errata
In case this helps the laptop is the Asus UA46E-BAL7. I do not having any USB devices plugged in. Also it is dual-booting with Windows 7, though I had not yet booted into Win7 until after this happened, merely to test to see if that was having trouble as well (so far seems to boot fine every time). While it is brand new to me, it was a refurbed so a hardware issue isn't out of question, and the text logging seems to indicate a CPU issue, but that doesn't explain why it works fine in Windows.
Again, if this was a Windows machine I would be able to troubleshoot it. Boot into safemode, check for driver incompatibilities, run any one of the bootable hardware diagnostic disks I have, perform a repair installation of Windows, etc. But for Linux I don't know where to begin.