Graphic driver installed for upgrade to Natty has problem

[Joe]

I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) from 10.10. When I attempt to reboot to complete the upgrade, the grub menu does not display, According to the documentation, I should be able to press SHIFT (until the menu displays) to display the grub menu. This does not occur for me on my system. The system boots by default to the first image. Adter several suggestions, it was apparent that the grub menu was there just not displaying correctly (see question 155140). I then installed a Nvidia driver (from their website), and upgraded again. This time the grub menu displayed as expected. I am not sure why the upgrade did not install a new driver. Maybe it did. I have a Nvidia GeForce 500 series graphics card. The driver I installed (maybe incorrectly) was for a Geforce GTX 580. When I was experiencing the grub menu display problem, and the system booted by default into 11.04, I tried activating all the Nvidia drivers available and they all experience the same problem. However, with the new Nvidia driver, the grub menu displayed correctly,,but the system did not boot. So bottom line, I am unanble to upgrade to 11.04.

[Joe (jgsylvesterjr)]

I am currently running 64-bit 10.10 on a HP Pavilion a6430f PC with a GeForce 500 Series graphis card. The Nvidia driver installed was version 270.41.06.

[Joe (jgsylvesterjr)]

I am not running a GeForce 500 series (I wish). The graphics card is Nvidia GeForce 6150SE n430.

[Joe (jgsylvesterjr)]

I tried upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04 again. This time, the grub menu displayed as expected, but I was unable to boot into Ubuntu Unity. I could boot into Ubuntu Classic and Classic (no effects). As mentioned previously, when I attempt to boot into Unity, I only get hard drive icons - no menu bars and no Unity task bar on the left side. It's as if the upgrade to Unity was not complete.

[Joe (jgsylvesterjr)]

As detailed in the associated question #155140, I found a URL that contained a seried of suggestions on things to try to resolve the no desktop issue (http://askubuntu.com/questions/37651/how-can-i-activate-unity). For my case, the upgrade to 11.04 either removed or never installed the software package "compiz-gnome". I installed this package, activiated the Ubuntu Unity plugin via Compiz Settings Manager, rebooted, and was presented with the Unity desktop.

[Joe (jgsylvesterjr)]

I did a fresh install of 11.04 onto a different partition (dev/sda7). I had no graphic driver problem. The grub menu did NOT display. I uncommented the /etc/default/grub parameter of GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480, performed an update-grub, and rebooted. The grub menu did display this time. I had tried this during the original problem, and it did not work for me. I am at a loss to understand what went wrong in the initial upgrade to 11.04.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

If you are able to reproduce this, please attach the results of the boot info script from sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for grub2 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]