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Edit: it fixed itself, but I have no idea how...

I have a new laptop running Ubuntu 11.04. If I have certain USB devices (a wireless mouse, or my camera, but not a USB flash drive) plugged in to any of the computer's USB ports, Ubuntu won't boot. (They work fine as long as I plug them in once I can see an Ubuntu splash screen.) It gets to GRUB, and if I run in recovery mode, it starts booting, then freezes at about 2 seconds, and goes to a black screen. (Without recovery mode, it just does the black screen.)

Ctrl+Alt+F1 does nothing; I also can't ssh into it at this point. Removing kernel options quiet splash from GRUB did nothing except give a "Loading, please wait..." message with the USB not plugged in; the same for replacing them with noapic. My BIOS has no "legacy USB" option that I can find.

Nothing I can find in /var/log is updated when this happens, so I have no logs.

Any ideas?

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Did you check logfiles for errors? (/var/log/boot.log and /var/log/boot for instance). Re-installing grub might be an option. – Rinzwind Aug 20 '11 at 22:20
I see no errors, but that may be because they're being overwritten when I reboot again (with mouse unplugged to get back to a useable system). – Ben Kraft Aug 20 '11 at 22:36
Boot, wait for it to crash. Turn system of and then use a live cd to look at /var/log. That way your log files should be useable IF the system even gets there to write an error ;) – Rinzwind Aug 20 '11 at 22:39
Tried that; all of the files are from the boots before the crash. I assume it's not getting to the point where it writes the logs. – Ben Kraft Aug 20 '11 at 23:22

closed as too localized by Bruno Pereira♦ Feb 26 '12 at 22:11

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2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

You could do the folllowing: You could disbale the USB ports until the boot ends and then activate the USB ports: I think you could do this via vim.

cd /etc/default
sudo vim acpi-support
Change the module line the following:
MODULES="usbcore"

I am really not sure if this works and if this has the consequence that your USB ports doesn't work anymore I will not take that on me. I would recommend this solution only experts who could redo this. Only works if you got usbcore. Some peaople haven't got it. You should first test if you have got it:

$ ls -l /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/usb/usbcore.o*

Could also work with this folder: /usr/src/linux-your-version/drivers/usb

This could work because: If you start ubuntu your usb devices are of course off but after the boot they should of course be activated like after a suspend. I had this problems ones with an laptop. It would also be very cool if you tell us your exactly laptop model because it could have other reasons.

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up vote 0 down vote

Your do nousb as grub boot command and activate it after boot but I don't know how to. Or maybe easier disable acpi support and do a quit splash should work with: ro quiet splash noapic

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