I have tried to get my Dell Inspiron 1545 (with 2 cpus) to boot and display Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD and DVD (including the 9.10 Dell recovery DVD), both 32-bit and 64-bit. The system is currently running 9.04 (32-bit) flawlessly. I've also tried safe mode and turned off apic, etc. and connected an external monitor. I believe it boots (I can hear the start up tune) but I have no display on the LCD panel and cannot get to a shell terminal. I get some boot info on the external monitor (none on the LCD panel) but eventually goes black with no display. It will boot a Fedora 12 LiveCD with no problems. Not sure what else to try. Obviously I'm afraid to try to upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 or even do a clean install of 9.10. I've upgraded 4 other computers to 9.10 without problems (except on one I had to do a clean install as it failed to reboot after the upgrade). Any ideas would be appreciated.

Hmm, my 1545 boots perfectly from the 9.1 CD. Which graphics chip do you have? the Nvidia/ATI or the intel one?

During boot edit grub to remove quiet and splash and try it.

Here is info on the display:

lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)

I've tried removing quiet and splash - more printout before screen goes blank. How can I get it to boot into a console and prevent X from loading?

When the system does try to start the X server, just press CTRL-ALT-F1 to go to a text login screen.