I am running ubuntu 6.06 on a 15 gig ide harddrive that I haven't had in a pc for a few months. Drive has been sitting on a shelf. I booted the drive the other day, and all seemed well. The grub loaded and the boot process went as normal. The splash login screen for ubuntu came up, and I typed in my user name and password. It seemed to work normally, but then it went to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top-left hand corner, and then it went back to the login screen with the user-name box blanked out and no error message that you would normally see for a bad user name, password. It is like it is trying to log me on, but there is some problem with the gui or something else not loading. I can't seem to get any error messages out of it. I know my user name and password are correct because I booted the pc from an install disk and accessed the filesytem of my hard drive from there I changed my password to make sure it was correct. This also tells me that there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. I'm sort of stumped right now and looking for suggestions. I really don't want to reinstall. After all, this isn't Windows i'm talking about. Just kidding....

Was this drive in this same system when Ubuntu was installed on it? If not, there may be some hardware issues with Ubuntu and the current system that you're putting the hard drive into.

I doubt it, the drive has been used in this machine in the past with no problems.