Ubuntu

boots up, loads, shuts down after a few seconds

Asked by lil_pyro

I have a dell latitude l400, about 5 years old. its a piece of crap but its the only thing i got. i just installed ubuntu 6.06 2 days ago off an old cd. yesterday i updated it to 8.04. now today, i turn it on it and have to boot it on the revovery, it works till i get to the log in screen. when i get there, i have to type my user name in, then it shuts down. i turn it back on and its on the password screen, i type that in, then it shuts down again. every time i turn it on, it starts up where it left off but only stays on for a few seconds, then turns off. can some one help me figure out whats going on?

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hardcorelinux (hardcorelinux) said : 		#1

could be something to do with apci. Boot off the install CD drop to a shell, mount your root partition and rename the /etc/acpi directory.By this my hope is that, whatever script that would run when you login(generating an ACPI event) would fail because it does not exist.

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lil_pyro (lil-pyro-on-fire) said : 		#2

problem... i dont have the cd i installed from

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lil_pyro (lil-pyro-on-fire) said : 		#3

would this have something to do with this version being more graphics intensive? this laptop is a fair few years old and might not be able to handle the the more powerful graphics needed

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Tang (robertmcgreg) said : 		#4

Hi, I wouldn't be daunted by the age of your laptop
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/installation-guide/i386/hardware-supported.html

Is there any reason you can't download and burn a new maximum 20MB disk with the machine you're using now?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

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lil_pyro (lil-pyro-on-fire) said : 		#5

well this is my brothers laptop and he'd kill me if i did and i dont have any blank disks. but a friend of mine is doing just that, he's going to bring it over when he finishes so we can see if that will work. thanks for the suggestion, ill see if it works

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Pramod Dematagoda (pmdematagoda) said : 		#6

Did you try creating a new user by booting Ubuntu in Recovery Mode, dropping to a console and then doing:-
sudo adduser name-of-newuser
and then trying to login as that new user to see if the login works well.

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