Ubuntu

blank screen

Asked by robjll

I just got my dell inspirion mini 910 and I have only had it a couple weeks. I dont know anything about Ubuntu. I saw yesterday that it had updates in the top right hand corner, so i clicked it. It was updating, and the computer froze so I turned it off and turned it back on. Now the ubuntu bar goes back and forth and loads to a blank tan/white screen. Help!!

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collinp (collinp) said : 		#1

Try booting into Recovery mode on the GRUB menu, then selecting root terminal, then running "dpkg --configure -a" should do the trick. Once that is done try booting Ubuntu.

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robjll (robjll) said : 		#2

how do you boot into recovery mode?

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#3

First get a distro you can use as a Live Cd (without installing anything to your computer). I prefer Wolvix for this
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wolvix
Bootup with the new Cd and use it to navigate to the folder (on your hard-drive (hence hda))
hda/boot/grub/
and now right click on menu.lst to open it with a text-editor such as gedit or something and save it as menu.lst.090118old and save it again as menu.lst. Roll down to where blocks of text like the one below and add this one somewhere after the first (the first block is the default OS that the machine will try to boot into).

title Ubuntu 8.04.2, kernel 2.6.24-23-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-23-generic root=UUID=66daaabd-ec15-4184-9ee5-df800b17fde2 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-23-generic

All the numbers are wrong because i just copied this from my machine so now edit the bit that says "root (hd0,2)" so that the numbers are the same as the the numbers in the blocks that were already there. Also change 2.6.24-23 to match the equivalent lines in the blocks that were already there & also the UUID= number to the same as the ones already on your machine. When done 'Save As...' menu.lst

All saved, backed up and nervous?
Reboot machine and when the menu appears go down to the item that has "recovery mode" in the title.
Congrats if that worked :)
Welcome in to linux :)
Regards and respect from
Tom :)

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#4

Or simply folow the frirst part of these instructions to get into recovery mode ;)
I wish i had read this earlier lol
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/resetpassword

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#5

If you are still having trouble with this then please post it as a new question. Only the most recent questions tend to get looked at so posting/reposting a question just before america arrives online gives the best chance of getting a good few answers.

If the problem has been resolved then please follow the link to the forum thread and mark it as Solved.

Good luck and many regards from
Tom :)

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