ubuntu only halfway boots
 

i installed the ubuntu 9.10 cd and for some reason as of last night it only boots halfway. it shows grub, shows loading keymap nd apparmor profiles, then before it shows mpd and apache load it erases everything and stops at a dark grey screen. all before i get a shell of any type. if i leave it alonethe screen still darkens like its going to sleep. is there any way to troubleshoot and fix this?

A. Get 10.04 as 9.10 will soon run out of support.
B. Did you try booting in recovery mode yet?

I don't get a choice to, my grub loads and disappears so quickly and I don't know what to change in menu.conf to fix that.