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I've just installed Windows XP and Ubuntu 11.04 on an old HP xw4300 workstation.

When Ubuntu loaded for the first time, I was prompted to install the proprietary nVidia drivers, which I did. Now, I'm seeing different behaviour in the system depending on whether I'm cold booting, or rebooting.

  • Cold Boot: grub appears with purple background, looks polished. Ubuntu loads normally.
  • Reboot: grub appears with black background, text is large. Ubuntu splash screen doesn't appear (replaced with black and white vertical lines), and the boot process stops when the screen is partially filled with random ASCII characters.

It doesn't seem to matter whether I reboot from Windows or Ubuntu - the symptoms are the same.

Any suggestions for fixing this are appreciated.

UPDATE: I bypassed this problem by installing the older Ubuntu 10.10. I installed the proprietary nVidia drivers on this installation, and no problems occur (although grub is now permanently black & white, with small text).

@RolandTaylor - I'm using one monitor (a HP L1706).

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How many monitors are you using? – RolandiXor♦ Sep 13 '11 at 21:14
This question appears to be abandoned, if you are experiencing a similar issue please ask a new question with details pertaining to your problem. If you feel this question is not abandoned, please flag the question explaining that. :) – jrg♦ Feb 28 '12 at 13:43

closed as too localized by jrg♦ Feb 28 '12 at 13:44

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