purchased a new dell mini, running ubuntu and the screen in blank. Any ideas on how to restore?

did your Dell Mini come preinstalled with Ubuntu? if so it was working fine yes? at what point did it fail? did you install any ubuntu updates from the internet, install any software, change any system files? please give us more information. if your computer didnt work out of the box (Dead on Arrival) then you should contact dell.

working fine when arrived and loaded w ubuntu. failed yesterday, about 20 days old. no updates loaded or software installed. thanks.

wow that sucks. i'm sorry to hear that. power cycle your computer off and then back on. make sure its not just in hibernate or suspend mode. hold down the power button for five seconds to manually shut the laptop off then you can power it on again. you should see the bios POST screen that tells you the cpu speed, ram, hd, etc. Now does ubuntu load? are there any error messages?

i get the dell screen, it goes dark and it states 'mbr', goes dark, then the screen is tan with just the cursor

master boot record? can you boot off a LiveCD and see if your data is still there on the drive? if so you can probably just use the supergrubdisk to fix your mbr and get up and running again swiftly.

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

if that doesnt work, did dell provide you with a system recovery disk you can use to get the computer back to the original factory settings?