Black screen during login, and nothing else...

Asked by deetex

Hi, complete newcomer here.

I installed Feisty on my laptop(Compaq Presario 700), and it ran all fine and dandy, untill in my infinite wisedome I desided to tweak a few settings.

Now whenever Ubuntu boots up. it gets past the title and the rolling bar, but before the Login screen shows up, well.... it actually doesn't, there's just the Black void, and the Waiting/Busy cursor.

I can Boot up in recovery mode, assuming its supposed to just show me something that looks like DOS... and "startx" logs in as _root, but when trying to boot up regularly, nada.

Asking around, personally I think I might need to restore to default install, but how do I do that? I can't seem to boot up form the CD.

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Pazy
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Revision history for this message
Lazlo (lazlo-deactivatedaccount) said :
#1

Which setting did you "tweak"?

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deetex (deetex-seraphine) said :
#2

I recall something about boot session? the origenal was (I think) "Last loaded session..."

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Pazy (pazy160) said :
#3

If you only installed a few days ago it may be worth simple reinstalling, if you havent made any important documents, and leave finding the correct command until you have 'settled in' as it were.

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Pazy (pazy160) said :
#4

Try this Command:
sudo dkpg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

From the recovery console. Assuming I have understood your problem right then it *should* work.

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deetex (deetex-seraphine) said :
#5

I'm assuming its not supposed to display :

sudo: dkpg-reconfigure: command not found

...Theres nothing on my laptop I find worth saving, any way I can completely reinstall it, without having to boot from the Live CD?

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Pazy (pazy160) said :
#6

Im not sure what you mean in the last bit but to reinstall you can download the ISO from ubuntu.com and burn it to a CD or order/use a the Ubuntu live CD.

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deetex (deetex-seraphine) said :
#7

I ment to say, I indeed don't have anything critical on it yet, reinstalling ubuntu sounds like a pretty good idea, the only thing is, I am not presented the Live CD menu when booting up(or attempting to boot up, in my case)

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Best Pazy (pazy160) said :
#8

It sounds like a BIOS problem, when you load up the system look for something saying 'Delete to enter Setup' or something like that.
I cant provide exact instructions as most BIOS's are diffrent but try and get the first boot option to be your CD/DVD drive and second your Hard Drive.

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deetex (deetex-seraphine) said :
#9

Yup, Altering my BIOS was exactly what I needed to do, to reformat it form the Live CD(Which turned out to be okay).

Running a fresh install, once again.

Thank you all ever so much for your support.

Now here's what I did wrong:

System => Administration => Login window

I changed "Default Session" from [Run Xclient script] into [GNOME]...

My problem is solved, and my laptop is spinning happier then ever before, so once again, THanks, all of you =D

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deetex (deetex-seraphine) said :
#10

Thanks Pazy, that solved my question.

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Pazy (pazy160) said :
#11

Pay it forward :D

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nikgenius (nikhil-chowdhary) said :
#12

Hi,

I am also facing the same issue. After I turn the computer on I just see a black screen with the mouse curser and do not see the Login screen to type my username or password. I didn't do any changes since the last time it worked correctly. Please help. I dont want to reinstall it again because on the other partation i have installed Windows XP and if I reinstall Ubuntu I would have to install XP also, which is time consuming and hectic.

thanks