Black screen at boot

Hello toaster99,

When you say "it crashes with a black screen" what do you mean -- it stops and nothing else is possible until a reboot?

Please try to boot without USPLASH -- as soon as GRUB is shown, ESCape, then:

1. position the cursor on the (first) boot line
2. hit the 'e' key to edit this line
3. position on the second line shown (this line will point to the actual Linux kernel to load)
4. hit the 'e' key to edit this line (without the quotes)
5. delete 'splash'
6. hit the 'Enter' key
7. hit the 'b' key to boot

This will boot Linux in line mode, and will allow you to see what happens. We are particularly interested in the last few lines shown.

When I turned off the splash screen like you told me to the laptop goes through all of the startup procedures and reports [OK] but ends up going to a black screen and freezes. It does not play a sound (as I've read happens sometimes in this scenario) before freezing. The only thing that seems out of the ordiinary while it reports the startup procedure is a PCI: BIOS BUG #81 [49435000] (first line of text linux outputs)

I wonder if there is a problem with X...

OK. When you boot the PC, go back in GRUB (ESCape as soon as GRUB starts), then select the single-user mode for boot. This will start Linux in single-user mode, without X (i.e., no graphics).

When the boot finishes, log in as root, and try to save the dmesg output -- copy it, if possible to a memory stick or similar --, and post it here. I think we will find something did not go exactly right when Linux was trying to find and set your hardware.

I was able to log in to single user mode once (took 4 trys until it didn't crash). I am able to view the dmesg output but how do I save it to a memory stick or maybe my C drive

I have the exact same issue on compaq v6000 with AMD turion64 x2 and Nvidia go. I mean the exact same problem: same distro, same bios bug error, same touchy booting. I've posted on a forum about it, but still can't figure it out. Booting in recovery mode seems to work, but it's not very "user friendly". To save Dmesg output to a file, try "dmesg >> file.txt". then you can move the file where ever you like.

I figured it out: try adding nolapic to the kernel options. What I did was I booted up and looked at my dmesg logs and Xorg.0.log, which both seemed to just randomly stop, but Xorg.0.log ended with "ProcXCloseDevice close or not?", which was weird, and seemed to be yet another annoying, nebulous Xorg failure (said with great contempt). Then I decided to google both the bios error and the xorg error together, and I found another answers.launchpad site which described a problem exactly like this (also with HP hardware, but I'm not pointing any fingers). In one of the posts, someone said to try the kernel options: noacpi irqpoll nolapic acpi=off. I tried these, and it booted right up, no coaxing. ACPI has worked before for me, so I discounted those, and rebooted (which worked. Not only that, but it actually fully shut down this time). Then I removed nolapic and it didn't work. I swapped irqpoll for noalpic and it worked perfectly again. I'm going to try to figure out what I've disabled by doing that, but as you can tell, wireless is working, sound is working, so is ACPI, and X is definately working. Good luck