Hi. I recently installed Ubuntu 7.04 onto a second hard drive that I installed. When I choose Ubuntu from the grub menu, I see:

Starting...
Loading...

And then the screen goes black and hangs. Someone showed me that I can get my PC to boot into Linux by performing the following steps from the grub (boot loader) menu:

1.) At the grub menu, select 'e' to edit the Ubuntu start up commands
2.) I then remove the quiet command
3.) I press 'b' to boot
4.) The screen then goes black and just hangs
5.) At this black screen, I can press ctrl + alt + F1

This allows the gui to come up, and I can log in normally. Everything else functions fine from this point. I am also able to shutdown using the 'quit' menu option then the 'shutdown' icon. This physically shuts down my machine.

I also notice that when the machine hangs on the black screen, and I do not press ctl+alt+F1, the power button does not respond when trying to power off manually. I literally have to cut the power on the power strip to kill my machine.

How can I get my machine to boot into Ubuntu "cleanly"? I have already tried installing multiple times with newly burned installation CDs. Also, I noticed in the Ubuntu device manager that there is a section for "Power Button". Should something be adjusted here to configure the power button properly?

My PC is @ 5 years old:

Gateway 300X
Celeron 1.8GHz processor
768MB ram

Thanks!

Have a look here :

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

and try the options suggested to see if any of those helps. I have 6.06 installed on an older laptop, and I could not get Fistey to load either. I found the boot options poorly documented for Ubuntu.

Hope this helps.

It worked! Thanks so much!!

I followed the directions in the link that you provided. I did the following:

1.) Backed up /boot/grub/menu.lst
2.) Added vga=771 noapic nolapic to the end of the # kopt line
3.) Tried multiple shutdowns and restarts and it works consistently!

Thanks again! I really appreciate your help!

You are welcome, I'm glad it worked for you.

Sorry, but I left out a step:

2a.) Ran sudo update-grub

Thanks again!