Ubuntu 7.10 upgrade hanging on restart

[Markbnj]

Hey guys, decided to let Ubuntu upgrade itself last night. Everything went fine through the clean-up and restart, but on boot the OS hangs on the third bubble of the splash screen's progress bar. Has happened on three tries, so something is obviously screwed. How can I get rid of the splash screen so I can see what's hanging? Has anyone else had a similar issue? The machine is an old Dell XPS with a vanilla nVidia card, pretty much nothing else.

Any thoughts?

 

[Nothinman]

When GRUB comes up hit esc to get the menu, hit 'e' on the kernel entry that you want to boot, hit 'e' again on the kernel line and remove 'quiet splash' from the end.

 

[Markbnj]

Thanks. I will try that right now and post back with what I can learn.

Edit: ok, that did it, thanks. I remember this problem from when I installed. Ubuntu didn't preserve the switch that turned ACPI off. What is that again... noacpi or something like that?

 

[Markbnj]

Crap, different problem. The upgrade did preserve the acpi=off kernel option. The fault is occuring during loading of hardware drivers, but right now the problem is that it scrolls through several pages of faults and I can't see the point of the original error. Anything else I can try?

 

[Robor]

A quick search turned up these two switches for menu.lst: acpi=off pci=noacpi

 

[Nothinman]

Depends on how man pages of faults there really are but adding 'vga=791' should set the console to 1024x768 so more will fit on the screen.

 

[Nothinman]

pci=noacpi just disables the use of the ACPI tables for IRQ routing, it doesn't disable ACPI itself.

 

[Robor]

I had issues with my upgrade @ home so I just downloaded a 7.10 CD and went overtop of my existing install. I have a separate /home directory so none of my personal data was lost. Just had to reinstall a few proggies - namely VMWare Server.

 

[Markbnj]

Thanks guys. I'm dl'ing the livecd now. I'll try a reinstall rather than upgrade and see how it goes. If that doesn't work I might just fall back to feisty. Should have read the forums at ubuntu.com first, as it seems lots of people are having issues with gutsy, and a lot of them are running HP/Compaq boxes (which this is, not the Dell I mistakenly identified it as in the OP).

I've decided to use this machine primarily as a database/disk server. Maybe I should be looking at a different rel? I need to run Oracle 10g express on it.

Depends on how man pages of faults there really are but adding 'vga=791' should set the console to 1024x768 so more will fit on the screen.

Adding vga=791 to the kernel opts resulted in a blank screen. The boot seq continued as before, but there was no display.

 

[Nothinman]

I need to run Oracle 10g express on it.

Is Oracle certified on Ubuntu or Debian now? If not you might have a simpler time with RHEL or CentOS.

 

[Bremen]

Originally posted by: Robor
I had issues with my upgrade @ home so I just downloaded a 7.10 CD and went overtop of my existing install. I have a separate /home directory so none of my personal data was lost. Just had to reinstall a few proggies - namely VMWare Server.

Same here. The Gutsy upgrade fubared by system and I had to resort to a livecd.

 

[Markbnj]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I need to run Oracle 10g express on it.

Is Oracle certified on Ubuntu or Debian now? If not you might have a simpler time with RHEL or CentOS.

It's good for Debian, according to the docs.

I burned a livecd of 7.10, so I'll try that and see what happens.

Edit: got it booted. It was that stupid PCI nVidia graphics adapter. I had the same problem when I first installed back in July, and booted off of the onboard. Somehow I got the PCI card working afterward, but I don't recall exactly what I did. Probably installed the latest nVidia linux driver. Anyway, I switched to onboard and it booted this time, but the shell couldn't determine the proper graphics mode. Shut down and physically removed the PCI card and it booted all the way through to the desktop. Since I am not going to be playing with any eye candy on this machine I am just going to leave it that way.

Thanks for your help everyone.