10.04: Boot halts at Ubuntu logo after drive reformat

[SentientFluid]

Had 32-bit 10.04 running just fine with the restricted nvida drivers. I reformatted /dev/sdc1 to ext4 and rebooted and now the boot hangs at the Ubuntu logo with the dots under it.

A message does appear under the logo, however Plymouth and the restricted nvidia drivers don't play nice together so I am completely unable to read it.

At first I was thinking it was an fsck message but I've left it there overnight with no change.

I've brought up tty and tried

dpkg-reconfigure -p high xserver-xorg

to reset xorg.conf but same issue on reboot.

I've also renamed xorg.conf and booted without one and same issue.

In xorg.conf I replaced 'nvidia' with 'nv' and same issue.

Any ideas other than reloading 10.04?

[Lateralis]

Xorg went through some big changes a year ago. I don't think it really uses xorg.conf for its configuration anymore like it used to. I could be wrong on that front, but certainly its changed a lot.

Have you tried loading up without starting x; changing run level to either 1 or 3 in the kernel line options through Grub? I'm guessing you have and that worked OK?

[SentientFluid]

Have you tried loading up without starting x; changing run level to either 1 or 3 in the kernel line options through Grub?

I tried adding "text" to the kernel line but same issue. Not sure if Upstart knows what to do with that, though.

What's the proper way to set run level through Grub?

[Lateralis]

With the grub menu up, select the kernel you wish to use and hit e. On the next screen select the kernel line and hit e again. At the end of the line put a either a 1 or a 3 (for run level 1 or 3 respectively). I would chose three, as you login as yourself, have networking and all that jazz, but for the purposes of testing whether system is at least in principle bootable, either should do.

[QLee]

... I don't think it really uses xorg.conf for its configuration anymore like it used to. I could be wrong on that front, but certainly its changed a lot.
...

It is no longer required, however, it will be parsed and used if it exists.

Agree about big changes, it's actually easier for many users now, that's small comfort to the people who are having problems but the config file can be used to make some hardware work.

[SentientFluid]

With the grub menu up, select the kernel you wish to use and hit e. On the next screen select the kernel line and hit e again. At the end of the line put a either a 1 or a 3 (for run level 1 or 3 respectively). I would chose three, as you login as yourself, have networking and all that jazz, but for the purposes of testing whether system is at least in principle bootable, either should do.

I can bring up the console using Alt-F1 and if I leave it there long enough I can log in as my user. This is how I tried to reconfigure xserver-org. So this would mean the system is bootable, would it not?

I have attached a couple of screenshots to illustrate what I see.
One shows the Ubuntu logo where it stops booting, and the other shows what I see when I switch to the console.

When in the console I am able to make out the login prompt and, after entering my username, the password prompt.

I am thinking that uninstalling the nvidia drivers will allow me to read the message on the screen more clearly which will give me an idea of what's going on.

Since I can't finish booting into Ubuntu, I'll need to do it from the command line even though I'll be typing "blind".

Is

sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia-*

the best way to do this?

Or am I making this more complex than needed? Booting from the LiveCD will give me full access to the drives so maybe there's a log I can get the error message from...?

[philinux]

How about using recovery mode from grub. Then sudo apt-get remove nvidia-current then reboot. You might while inrecovery rename xorg.conf to make sure it out of the way.

[SentientFluid]

How about using recovery mode from grub. Then sudo apt-get remove nvidia-current then reboot. You might while inrecovery rename xorg.conf to make sure it out of the way.

No recovery mode options showing in the grub menu. I reinstalled Grub2 from the LiveCD and they still don't show.

Edited the grub menu item and this is the kernel line that shows:

linux /vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=<snipped> ro splash vga=788 quiet splash

Tried adding "1" at the end of all that and had the same issue.

Then tried replacing everything after "ro" with "1" which finally let me see the boot messages.

It seemed to hang showing the following error, which appeared after fsck reported all partitions were clean:

init ureadahead-other main process (787) terminated with status 4

Tried booting with various versions of the kernel line ("ro splash 1", "ro splash quiet 1", "ro recovery") all with essentially the same error, only the bracketed number changed (760, 791, 772).

Also kept seeing the following error, though sometimes fsck runs after it so I don't think it's the cause. Included for completeness sake...

AC'97 1 access is not valid [0xffffffff], removing mixer
Unable to initialize codec #1

If I leave "vga=788" out of the kernel line then I don't seem to have the video issue so I'm going to try removing only it and booting at the normal run-level.

In the mean time, any ideas? For reference this was a clean install on a freshly partitioned and formatted drive.

[SentientFluid]

Ok, so removing vga=788 gets rid of the scrambled screen issue and I can now see the error...

The disk drive for /media/Seagate is not ready or present
Continue to wait; or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

None of the options (wait, S, M) work, system just clears the error message and hangs at the logo screen.

The drive in question is /dev/sdc which is the drive I repartioned (single ext4 partition) prior to all of this happening.

Went to the console and opened /etc/fstab and saw it was trying to mount /dev/sdc1 as NTFS so I removed all reference from fstab and rebooted. Still hangs at the logo.

Any ideas?

[SentientFluid]

Logged in under runlevel 3 and started gdm with

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

Then used GParted to repartition /dev/sdc1. Everything worked fine on reboot.

I think I accidentally unchecked Round to Cylinders when I formatted the drive before all this happened.

Anyway, thanks for helping job my memory with Grub and runlevels!