Please help me...

This is really bad... and I have no clue what is wrong. I logged out of my laptop running ubuntu 9.04 and I got a blank screen, so I shut down and restarted. Since then I only get the boot grub screen, the ubuntu loader and then a blinking screen with multi colours on it. Whats wrong? What did I do? Can I fix this? The laptop is brand new and was w/ vista. I have a recovery and a drivers cd. Thank you!

 

sounds some how your video drivers got screwed up. I am new myself to this OS but you should press alt-f2 and log in and have access via prompt to your pc. Take a look at your X-org file.

 

There is no response to any keys, but I can try. How do I get to the X-org file? I do think I may know the cause now, I add a new user before logging off. Maybe I should have restarted before I did this.

I'm totally new to this OS and kinda newbie in the PC department too. I may own several PCs but I haven't really used one in the last two years.


ETA- As much as I hate to, I'm using the recovery disk at the moment to put vista back on. I'll do more research (on vista), make sure I have all the data I need and then try Ubuntu again. Fingers crossed that will recovery work.

 

There is also a recovery mode on the Ubuntu CD... but it's probably not necessary in this case.

You could boot using single user mode and reinstall the NVIDIA graphics driver at the command line, but a bit too late for that now

After the GRUB screen do you see any loading screens or anything, your screen should go blank an few times before the colors start flying if it is an xorg problem.

 

Also, are there any messages that come up saying the X server failed? Or do you see no text at all?

 

Installing Ubuntu again now. Where can I find driver information? (To prevent this from happening)

I realised that I could have fixed it some other way, except that over on ubuntuforums.org they all claimed it had to be hardware problem, so I used the vista recovery to make sure that it wasn't. Atleast I'm getting good practice at this installing thing. My dad freaked when he saw the screen thinking that I had already broken the lappy. Nope, still in one piece. (thank God!)

 

Well, this seams to me like a broken filesystem. What did you use there? LVM with ext3? Perhaps some raid, combinations?
I had similar problem at work where one station with 4 scsci hdds in sw raid 5 + LVM + ext3 refused boot in same way you just described.
Grub started (phase one) and that was all. This happend after power outage.
I started from linux boot cd In rescue mode, found that 2 of 4 disks were in fail state (too much for raid 5), then after some time fussing with mdadm command i got raid repaired, after reboot resynced and problem solved.
Graphic problem is not likely in this case. If there is bad driver, it'd at least boot to runlevel 3 without X....
But if you're reinstalling anyway, problem solved :.))

 

This could still be the case. Many hardware problems are intermittent and very difficult to pin down.

I believe this is the main NVIDIA Linux/Unix driver page.

In any case, NVIDIA's proprietary video driver is one of the best Linux video drivers. Unless you were messing with files as root (adding a user shouldn't have any effect), I can't think of any reason for it to just stop working like that. Watch for this issue, because it's quite possible that it'll resurface some time in the near future.