I did a full installation and everytime I start my computer, I've to click the boot menu for it to start up normally .
Any way it can get it to just start up normally ?

How can you click the boot menu? Your mouse is not functional at that point.
What happens if you don't click it?

Well, I've to press f12 to get to my boot menu .
If I don't press it, I just get a black screen

Or I get these four options:

Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic
Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31.-14-generic (recovery mode)
Memory test (memtest86+)
Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)

Try looking at the settings in /etc/default/grub. You may find the setting you want to change in there.
Don't forget to run update-grub after you edit the file.

ehmm, how do you do that ? >____<

Then after editing the file...

Hi
I am using Linux 9.10 too. It has been working well and normally, but yesterday would not load up. It failed a file system check, goes into a "maintenance shell", and then I get confused! I followed a thread and have discovered that I can use my login and have it accepted, but I don't understand what to do then to get to any files, the normal looking desktop etc...

It is probably relevant that the mouse pad seems to have stopped working overnight too.

I don't have a backup of my files, so if I have to reinstall, is there any way of getting at files like photos before doing a reinstall?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Stuart B

Stuart, after you get to the shell and login, have you tried typing

If you try that, post back with any errors you may get.


I am not quite sure why you are getting the error, but you can reinstall from your disc. First, boot up using the Live CD and copy your files from your /home directory to another partition or upload them to an online backup site. If I am not mistaken, Ubuntu offers 1 gig of online storage for free.

After saving your work, just reinstall as usual. I would suggest that the next time you install Linux that you keep your /home directory on a separate partition to avoid this issue. If you need help with this, let us know.

-Colin

Hi Colin,

Thank you for your help. After typing "sudo startx", I got a load of text - too much to write before it disappeared over the top of the screen!

What seemed to be a summary at the end of all of this said:
Fatal server error:
could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock
Please consult the X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help

ddxSigGiveUp:closing log
giving up
xinit:no such file or directory (errno 2) unable to connect to x server
xinit:no such process (errno 3): server error
xauth:error in locking authority file /home/stuart/-Xauthority

I don't know if any of that is helpful! But thank you very much for trying.

I will get a usb hard drive tomorrow to copy files to and try to boot up from CD. When it fails the file system test at 54%, it tells me that the mount of filesystem failed.

Thanks again

Stuart

fsck it with a live cd

There is probably more than one error and issue here. You can try my route of just backing up and reinstalling or do as Leopard said and fsck with a live disc. That would be good for you if you want to learn how Linux works under the hood and make use of a great tool. I have personally never used it, but I always keep a live disc in case.

EDIT: After doing some research, it turns out I was wrong. You do not need to mount the file system, you actually want it unmounted. Unfortunately, Ubuntu does not have, at least to my knowledge, a DVD with a repair tool like Fedora and OpenSuSe.

1 members found this post helpful.

Also Stuart, you don't need a full hard drive to copy your files to. You can always just get a USB Flash Drive. I saw some 4 gig drives for around 10 bucks. They are dirt cheap now, and so long as you dont need to save too much you can use one of those.

I often use my iPod as a way of storing things as well. It will mount in Ubuntu, and you can just copy and paste files in there. This is another option. Just be sure not to format that iPod before putting your files on your new system. I lost a lot of data by doing that.

1 members found this post helpful.

I can't get Ubuntu 9.10 to boot from my flash drive correctly, either. It worked once, but now I can't get it to work again. What it does is it goes through the checklist of stuff with the Ubuntu logo pulsating like normal, then it goes to a screen where it says that there's some I/O error thing, and that keeps repeating itself for a little bit (it did that when I first got it to run, but it stopped, and went to the Ubuntu start screen thing), but now, after that goes for a bit, it stops, and it goes to a new screen where a long bit of text repeats itself extremely fast and scrolls upwards, (too fast for me to read it all), and it says something like "Pending != NULL" failed. Can somebody help me out here? I have no previous experience with Linux at all, so I'm COMPLETELY lost.

Hello Ninja Raccoon and welcome to LinuxQuestions,

First of all don't hijack other threads but instead open your own one to get the attention your question deserves. Click on the report button in your thread and ask one of the mods to put it in a new thread. That'll get you started.

Next you need to provide some more information, is meaningless, as is . The more detail you can provide, the sooner someone here can try to help you.

Kind regards,

Eric