boot stops before login screen
 

Hi everybody
I run ubuntu 10.10 32 bit on a pc with a GForce 9600 GT VGA and P5KPL-SE mainboard.
Sometimes, while booting, after the letters on the screen message " booting from hd1..." get thinner, everything stops and I dont get the purple login screen. After switcihng pc off and rebooting, usually, everything is OK. I used proprietary nvidia driver version current and after switching to version 173 (considering that it might had to do with the driver), maybe it somewhat improved things but the problem persists.
IT is not that terrible to reboot except for that I use this pc at work and switching it off sometimes starts the disk check for errors utility which lasts long since disk is 1 TB
I tried to read dmesg but am not familiar with the terms I show and gave up
Any ideas please?
Thanks

Can you try booting init 1 level

Could you please tell me how to boot init 1 level and what exactly it means?