Comment 13 for bug 483359

I used to have this problem with a prior version of the kernel, but only a few times, on a Dell Inspiron 1501. After upgrading to kernel 2.6.31-17-generic it became very bad. Booting up now always ends up in a blank screen. I have to boot in failsafe mode. Even though I can't really boot the system in failsafe mode (it ends up with the recovery menu which then is literally overwritten by the messages of the filesystem check before it freezes and the led of the hd turns off), the system will start normally when I afterwards do a normal start.

From what I read in several forums, there are two possible things that cause this: one is a bug in modemmanager, it helped some people to uninstall it. It didn't work for me, though. The other one is a bug in fsck because it is during the checking of the filesystem that the freeze occurs. But the filesystem should only be checked every 30th time a partition is booted and now I have this problem with every boot! Besides, sudo touch /forcefsck didn't work for me either.
Could it be that this is a usplash or a kernel bug?

Has anyone solved this? Please let me know, if I can provide any more information. I'll downgrade the kernel and test if the problem remains and post it here.