Comment 73 for bug 106864

My interpretation, "can't access tty" is a catchall message that something broke somewhere and Ubuntu isn't going to tell you what failed. Example Gutsy winds up with the same message on the same hardware, however the developer's fix break=top and modprobe piix don't work because it fails before the break occurs, and in any case doesn't have module piix.

The situation appears to be quite time dependent and although there are a bunch of us who would be quite willing to try fixes, there's no indication that Ubuntu development is looking into this situation.

For computers that "can't access tty" either use Edgy or PCLinuxOS or maybe you can come up with a trick way to boot.....

Cheers, Jerry