10.04 failure to boot

[Pat Leamon]

Binary package hint: xsplash

What I expected to happen:
Turn computer on
See splash screen
See login screen

What happened:
Turn computer on
Saw blank screen with a blinking cursor. Sometimes 4 lines down, sometimes in top left corner.
Switched to a completely black screen
Switched back to blank screen with cursor
Flashing HDD activity light
....
waiting
...
Reset
Saw blank screen with a blinking cursor. Sometimes 4 lines down, sometimes in top left corner.
Switched to a completely black screen
Switched back to blank screen with cursor
Flashing HDD activity light
....
waiting
...
Power off
Turn computer on
Saw blank screen with a blinking cursor. Sometimes 4 lines down, sometimes in top left corner.
Switched to a completely black screen
Switched back to blank screen with cursor
Briefly saw a purple screen with a some red dots, image was quite corrupted
Saw login screen (hooray).
Filed bug.

I have no idea what information is needed to figure out what is happening. Let me know what you need. I occasionally had a similar error in 9.10 but it was rare enough it didn't matter. During the waiting I only waited a few minutes. It's possible it may have booted eventually.

System is:
10.04 x64 upgraded from 9.10 via update manager
amd x2 5600
2gb ram
256mb nvidia 7600
sata western digital 1.5tb
sata icy box enclosure (no drive in it)
ide dvd writer
---
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 47f97b5b6a4fd4113e0977eef1f297c6
CheckboxSystem: 0531969bcfd4f03af7405c98dc94a948
CurrentDmesg:
 [ 24.477706] alloc irq_desc for 29 on node 0
 [ 24.477710] alloc kstat_irqs on node 0
 [ 24.477719] forcedeth 0000:00:08.0: irq 29 for MSI/MSI-X
 [ 24.646753] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver
 [ 34.880011] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
DefaultPlymouth: /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo/ubuntu-logo.plymouth
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
Lsusb:
 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
MachineType: MSI MS-7260
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: plymouth 0.8.2-2ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-21-generic root=UUID=17fd4f79-b4e4-4070-9c2b-f13724fc6356 ro quiet splash
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_GB.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcFB: 0 VGA16 VGA
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Tags: lucid
TextPlymouth: /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-text/ubuntu-text.plymouth
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic x86_64
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare shared
dmi.bios.date: 09/06/2007
dmi.bios.vendor: MS-7260
dmi.bios.version: V1.9
dmi.board.asset.tag: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
dmi.board.name: MS-7260
dmi.board.vendor: MSI
dmi.board.version: 1.0
dmi.chassis.asset.tag: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
dmi.chassis.type: 3
dmi.chassis.vendor: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
dmi.chassis.version: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnMS-7260:bvrV1.9:bd09/06/2007:svnMSI:pnMS-7260:pvr1.0:rvnMSI:rnMS-7260:rvr1.0:cvnToBeFilledByO.E.M.:ct3:cvrToBeFilledByO.E.M.:
dmi.product.name: MS-7260
dmi.product.version: 1.0
dmi.sys.vendor: MSI

[Cody Russell (bratsche)]

Could possibly be related to Plymouth, but since you occasionally had this happen during 9.10 that makes me think this might be related to X itself but I'm not quite sure. I'm going to tentatively assign this to Plymouth for now.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

please run 'apport-collect 573254'.

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

apport information

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

apport information

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

apport information

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

apport information

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

apport information

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

apport information

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

apport information

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

apport information

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

Happened again today, but slightly different symptoms:

Turn computer on
BIOS loads ok
During boot sequence saw blank screen with a blinking cursor. Always about 4 lines down.
Mode switch to completely black screen
HDD light constantly on
...
wait
...
reset
everything repeats exactly as before
...
wait
...
Power off
Power on
everything ok again

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

Something very similar again today, even though I have upgraded motherboard/memory/cpu/video card. These are now a Asus m4A77TD pro/4gb DDR3/Athlon II X4 630/GT 220 512mb gddr3

This time I got an error message along the lines of:
Failed to load linux headers, please load the kernel first, both default and fallback.
Press any key to continue...

On pressing a key the HDD light goes on for ages but nothing further happened.

After using the reset button it didn't work again either, but a power off/on worked. Anything else I can do to get more information about this?

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

Happened again today (has also happened a few more times that I haven't commented on). This time I let it run for about 10-15 minutes. When I came back the HDD light was still on and I still had a black screen. When I hit the power button I got a screen full of messages. I took a photo (attached). Sorry about the poor quality.

[Pat Leamon (pleamonhp)]

Not that I understand much, but from that picture it looks like my drive is failing. When I check the SMART data for it it says I have 16 pending sectors, but 0 uncorrectable sectors. So is my disk not playing nicely with Linux or is it actually failing? Western Digital say they don't support any operational issues with linux for the drive I have.

[Adam Parker (boddingtonbaby)]

Just to add that I am getting similar symptoms on a dual boot Dell 1558.

When selecting Ubuntu from Grub, on some occasions I will be left with the blinking cursor in the extreme top left of the screen and this will either stay like this or move on to some garbled text with a red background.

When it does work, the blinking cursor appears, but then a command regarding Plymouth and SIGINT received appears on the screen, another command references AppArmour and then Ubuntu boots normally.

I'm running 10.04 LTS.

[psylem (subnetjet)]

This bug looks the same as this one... https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/609845

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

Marked as duplicate of bug #609845.