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My newely installed Ubuntu on an HP Pavilion G7 is behaving weird in the loading (Booting) process. It sometimes loads from the first time, it sometimes stucks at a purple screen for over 4 minutes. It Sometimes stucks at a black screen and it sometimes loads with a dimmed screen.

There is no way to predict how will the next boot / reboot process behave. It's completely random, searched a lot and checked everything around here, played with the boot options like noacpi, nomodeset.

I am not able to predict what goes wrong especially that sometimes it does load perfectly well. I am currently writing this from a successful boot after 4 unsuccessful trials.

Note: I sometimes get "timeout: killing '/sbin/modprobe" errors with a nonsplash boot.

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  • I just ran a Full memory test and it returned no errors, all tests passed successfully Apr 23, 2013 at 8:51

2 Answers 2

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Try the following

  1. Use the boot option on grub that tests your memory to rule out memory issues
  2. Iffy USB devices, always boot without them connected. If its the mouse or the keyboard you can test that too by disconnection everything, see if you can successfully boot a bunch of times with no issues
  3. If there is a Wifi on/off switch on the laptop? If there is, always boot with it off

Otherwise you will need to trawl through error logs

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  • Ok Great ... this seems like it solved the issue (at least with 5 successful boots in a row). Will need to confirm it permanently solved it with few more boots later. Apr 23, 2013 at 10:49
  • Is there a permanent way to prevent ubuntu from checking the WiFi while booting ?! I am not able to make sure if my issues is completely solved or not. I sometimes forget to switch it off and sometimes it seems off but still fails to boot. Apr 24, 2013 at 10:34
  • Its one of those generic problems that is created via buggy hardware. It might be faulty or a weird setting. Now that you know the area to investigate I would recommend you do a search on your hardware and the WiFi switch. Debugging can be a pain, I have a iffy resume and have lived with it for a year. Its one of the small prices you pay for using open source.
    – Meer Borg
    Apr 24, 2013 at 10:40
  • Well it's obvious now the wireless driver is the main cause in my situation. i found 2 drivers online one driver doesn't cause this boot issue but results in a very weak and unstable connections. The other driver won't boot smoothly unless I switch off the wireless adapter before the splash screen (as @MeerBorg suggested) I would stick to option 2 since the quality of the connection is more important now Apr 24, 2013 at 14:04
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Well apparently updating to Ubuntu 13.04 solved everything since even after "@Meer Borg" suggestions I got fewer random boots than before.

So far I have been on 13.04 for 2 days and it boots perfectly every time :)

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