I tried Bryce's second suggestion of using old kernels. I have two previous versions of 2.6.38 installed, 2.6.38-3-generic and 2.6.38-4-generic. I booted each into recovery and normal mode 4 times, for a total of 16 boots. Here's the number of times the boot was a success, where I either got to the recovery boot menu or gdm, (regardless of whether the screen brightness had to be manually increased from 0, or if the plymouth boot screen displayed).
At no time did I see a stack trace like the one I posted, but I've only seen that in recovery mode. (Would it be written somewhere persistent between boots? It's not in /var/log/syslog.)
I took more notes on the failures. They're pretty vague and qualitative, but have slightly more detail of what each boot was like.
I tried Bryce's second suggestion of using old kernels. I have two previous versions of 2.6.38 installed, 2.6.38-3-generic and 2.6.38-4-generic. I booted each into recovery and normal mode 4 times, for a total of 16 boots. Here's the number of times the boot was a success, where I either got to the recovery boot menu or gdm, (regardless of whether the screen brightness had to be manually increased from 0, or if the plymouth boot screen displayed).
2.6.38-4-generic, normal: 1 success, 3 failures
2.6.38-4-generic, recovery: 4 successes
2.6.38-3-generic, normal: 4 successes
2.6.38-3-generic, recovery: 3 successes, 1 failure
At no time did I see a stack trace like the one I posted, but I've only seen that in recovery mode. (Would it be written somewhere persistent between boots? It's not in /var/log/syslog.)
I took more notes on the failures. They're pretty vague and qualitative, but have slightly more detail of what each boot was like.