Booting to a black screen

[gnowak]

Hello.

I guess this is the right place to post...

I have been running Kubuntu a couple of weeks now, sometimes I install some software and change some settings in KDE. One day my laptop IBM A30 started to boot up to a black screen.
This is how it goes:

reboot -> Kubuntu 6.10 is booting -> Black screen -> I push the return button -> I am in the terminal where the following is stated:
starting up...
Ubuntu 6.10 a30 tty1
-> I hit Ctrl + Alt + F7 -> a black screen appears -> I hit enter -> KDE starts and I get to my desktop (I have auto-login enabled) (passwords are insecure in my world )

This procedure is a bit annoying... so my question is, how do I find the problem and fix it??

Thanks, Grzegorz.

[sky]

Re: Booting to a black screen

Hi,

Do you see any error messages in /var/log/Xorg.0.log ? Maybe also in dmesg...

Cheers

[gnowak]

Re: Booting to a black screen

Hi, thank you for the reply!

I can see some error messages in Xorg.0.log, but they shouldn't be any problem... or??

I now have the same problem on my desktop after upgrade to edgy from dapper....

The files from my laptop: grn.dk/up/log/dmesgLaptop.txt and grn.dk/up/log/Xorg.0.log.Laptop.txt
The files from my desktop: grn.dk/up/log/dmesgDesktop.txt and grn.dk/up/log/Xorg.0.log.Desktop.txt

Any help would be very appreciated.

Cheers

[penguin.ch]

Re: Booting to a black screen

Merely a guess: http://www.penguin.ch/dokuwiki/doku....t#x_server_gui

[gnowak]

Re: Booting to a black screen

Thanks for the tip, but I removed the errors regarding wacom, and found refresh rates in my monitor section in my xorg.conf.

In my /var/log/Xorg.0.log I still have one error
error opening security policy file /usr/lib/xserver/SecurityPolicy

I don't have the above error on my laptop, so I guess it's not the problem.

My desktop computer is also having problems with rebooting and shutting down.. it just hangs and I can't get access to any terminal.... so I can't even kill it properly...

[gnowak]

Re: Booting to a black screen

After removing the errors and changing my options in my sources.list both my laptop and desktop computers can run the display manager KDE by pressing:

CTRL + ALT + F7

But I still boot up into a black screen... when I press CTRL i can see I have booted into terminal 1 (tty1)... maybe an evil KDE error is lurking around?

[sky]

Re: Booting to a black screen

No, for me it was a known bug, a lot of users had to do this trick to get to kdm login screen... But I don't remember how they got out of it. Now I'm running all my computers on feisty and it's working. Sorry

Cheers

[gnowak]

Re: Booting to a black screen

GREAT , thanks for the tip. I upgraded to Feisty on both computers.

On my laptop it went smoothly and everything seems to work nice . My desktop has problems booting on the different kernels. On most old of my kernel versions it reports kernel panic - not syncing VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0).

And the newest kernel: 2.6.20-11-386 reports udev_db_add_device: unable to create db file

Working on a solution right now, any help is very appreciated.

Thanks, Grzegorz

[gnowak]

Re: Booting to a black screen

Hmm can't figure it out... I guess it's something with my an old installation of software RAID, in my boot log I have Assembling RAID arrays... fail

Hmm maybe I should try to downgrade to edgy, and see what happens?

Thanks, Grzegorz.

[dibl]

Re: Booting to a black screen

Unless you previously had Edgy booting correctly on that desktop computer, I doubt that the problem is the OS version. I think you are right about the previous RAID setup. Make sure your BIOS is showing the hard disk drive(s) correctly, and with no RAID settings. If you unplug the hard drives, and then turn on the computer with no hard drives in it, it will reset that part of BIOS. Then if you plug them back in, and turn it on, it will auto-recognize them. Possibly (and assuming all data is backed up) re-partioning and re-formatting the drive that you want Linux on would wipe out the prior RAID indicators on that drive -- I would use this GParted Live CD tool to do that:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

HTH

[gnowak]

Re: Booting to a black screen

Hmm.... I never had RAID working, and I can boot up in windows without any problems. I am not interested in wiping my Harddrives. I could make a backup of my home folder, and reinstall a fresh version of kubuntu it would work fine. Right now I would like to find a solution for this problem, so I know what to do another time.

Edgy didn't have problems with RAID...

I am also trying to get help in this forum: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...39#post2676039

Thanks, Grzegorz.

[gnowak]

Re: Booting to a black screen

Mkay, I gave up, installed a clean version of edgy, now it works....

Case closed.