pretty sure i have gotten the stick working, the blue light on it is flashing for the first time ever!

new problem is all i have is the black terminal screen asks me to log in and passwork and stays on it . How do i get back to my comp

I'm glad the USB stick seems to be working now. Let's see if we can figure out your lack of GUI (Graphical User Interface).

Try this in a terminal (the black text screen you're getting) and see if it helps:

This will tell Gnome Display Manager (which is supposed to start your GUI for you on boot) to stop and attempt to start again. The "| tee >> gdm.txt" part tells the terminal to show you what's happening while logging all of what it shows you to a file called "gdm.txt". This way, you can see what happens, and also have a log file that you can copy and paste from so that I/we can analyze it as needed. The "~" character (tilde) is at the top-left of a QWERTY keyboard, on the same key as "`" (backtick). Hold shift while pressing that key to access it. "~" always refers to your current user's home directory. In case you're unfamiliar with the "pipe" character ("|"), it's usually positioned near the backspace key, and on the same key as the backslash ("\"), so if you hold shift and press \ you will get a |. The pipe character is VERY useful in Linux because it lets you send the text output of one command into the "input channel" of another. This way, you can make the output more manageable, easier to read, save it in files, etc. There are a ton of useful tricks that use it.

Next, we will need to get that file off of your broken computer and onto a working one so that we can see it on this thread. For this, we can use a USB flash drive and a set of terminal commands. Here are the steps:

1) Insert a USB drive into a working computer and make sure that it has a little free space on it. We'll be needing less than 1MB, so that shouldn't be a problem.

2) On the working computer, rename the USB drive so that it will be easy to identify when we plug it into your Linux laptop. In Windows, you can right-click on the drive in (My) Computer and select "rename". Call it a 1-word (no spaces) name that has no special characters (like punctuation marks). Safely remove the drive when done.

3) Insert the drive into you broken laptop. Some text may come up on the screen saying it's found some new hardware. Don't worry about this text.

4) Type the following into the terminal, entering password as needed:

5) One of the entries listed will have the name of your USB drive in it. Make note of which "/dev/" location entry it's using. It will probably be something like "/dev/sdc1", but may have its own entry after "/dev/". We will use this location when we mount the drive for use.

6) Type this into the terminal to "mount" the drive's partition so we can write to it:

7) Make sure that the file copied properly by "concatenating" (outputting to terminal display) the file that should now be on the USB drive. For this you use the "cat" command:

You should now see what you saw when you first entered the "service gdm..." commands above. That means it worked. If you see nothing, or get an error, then it didn't work. If you didn't get any output the first time you used the "service gdm..." commands (even though you should have), then obviously there won't be anything to see in the file, so it doesn't really matter in that case.

8) Finally, we need to tell the system you're done using the USB drive, and are about to remove it. Do this:

9) Unplug the USB drive and plug it into your working computer. If you're using a Windows computer to read and post this file, you will need to use Wordpad, NOT Notepad to open it (due to Notepad's bad handling of Unix-style text files). You can find this in the start menu, under accessories, usually. Copy and paste it into this forum using the "CODE" tags, like this (to make it easier to read):

Remove the spaces between the letters when you want to use these tags. (They wouldn't show up as actual text if I entered them properly.)

We'll go from there. We may need to use the above proceedure to get different log files from your laptop in order to diagnose and solve this problem, so I may refer you to it in future posts.

(Also, of non-technical note: if you find a post helpful, you can click on the appropriate "Yes" link on the lower-right of that post. You can also add to a helpful person's reputation by clicking on the white/blue "balancing scales" on the lower left of a post. These sorts of things help to encourage posters to be polite and helpful, and are generally very appreciated. Optional, but still a kind thing to do if you feel so inclined.)

--Dane

when i put in the codes they work untill i put in

sudo cp -vf ~/gdm.txt /mnt/usb/

then it pops up

cp: cannot stat '/home/tyson/gdm.txt' : No such file or directory

also when i punch in the stop service code it reads

stop: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.16" (uid=1000 pid=1687 comm="stop) interface="com.ubuntu.Upstart0_6.Job" member="Stop" error name="(unset)" requested_reply=0 destination="com.ubuntu.Upstart" (uid=0 pid=1 comm="/sbin/init"))

and when i do the start code everything is the same except

(uid=1000 pid=1692 comm="start)

???????

It looks like the file didn't get saved where it was supposed to. We'll have to see if the system has saved a log of its own. Here are the steps:

1) Do a fresh (re)boot of your laptop.

2) Gain root (administrator) access and navigate to your system's log directory:

3) Still as root (you should see a "#" character at the start of your command line when you're root; it'll be a "$" when you're NOT root), insert your USB disk into its port, wait 10 seconds, and mount it.

NOTE: when you're logged in as root (using "sudo su" - "su" meaning "super user" or "switch user" - you do NOT need to ever type sudo to get root priveledges. This is both useful and dangerous. Don't use sudo or root unless you have to, like you do now. Anything you can do as a "regular" user, such as your own login [tyson], should be done as that regular user.)

4) Copy the contents of gdm's log directory, as well as several other files, onto your flash drive:

5) Check to make sure it all got onto your USB drive:

This will give you all of the contents of the gdm directory on your USB drive. You may also want to do a "ls -lR /var/log/gdm" on your laptop to make sure they have matching contents. Please note that all terminal commands are CASE-SENSITIVE. Uppercase/lowercase matters a lot. If you have questions about any command, you can type "man <command>" (using only the first word of a command, such as "cp" or "ls") to see what it does, and how to use it. This will bring up the manual page for that command. Very few commands do not have manual pages. For those, you can usually execute the command with a "-h | less" or "--help | less" option, like this to see its help file:

6) If everything is on the drive that is supposed to be there, then unmount the drive and exit the root "shell" (command line):

This should put you back into your normal user, in that user's home directory.

7) Unplugg the drive. Plug it into another computer and post the contents of the following files, using "CODE" tags for easier reading. Be sure to use Wordpad if you're using Windows. You will have to open Wordpad first, then use its Open menu to open the files.

FILES TO POST
messagas
messages.1
dmesg
dmesg.0
Xorg.0.log
Xorg.0.log.old
gdm/:0-greeter.log
gdm/:0-greeter.log.1
gdm/:0.log
gdm/:0.log.1
gdm/:0-slave.log
gdm/:0-slave.log.1
gdm/xsplash-gdm.log
gdm/xsplash-user.log

Each of these files are going to most likely be pretty long. Please be sure to use the "CODE" tags around each individual file that you post, or it will be very hard for me to read!

Good luck. Let me know if you run into any problems.

--Dane

yea i dont know this computer might b done...

when i punch in the cp -vfr messages messages.1 dmesg dmesg.0 Xorg.0.log Xorg.0.log.old gdm/ -t /mnt/usb/ ...all of it starts with cp: cannot stat

anymore ideas or is it just a loss

You say "all of it starts with cp: cannot stat".
Aside from "cp: cannot stat `foo': No such file or directory", what else does it say? What else follows "cannot stat"?

kk who can tell me how to just start over and clear my comp and put the linux julia back on

Sorry for the late reply; I haven't checked my mail much in recent months.

How you go about it has somewhat to do with whether you intend to keep whatever data you have on it right now. Also, it might be a lot easier to fix (or ignore) the error, depending on how serious it is. I would like it if you posted the dmesg error in full detail, including a few messages before and after it.

If you have data, I'll need to know where you keep it, and how important it is to you. Otherwise, you can simply download the CD image (if you don't already have it), burn it to a CD, and then install it by booting from the CD and following the instructions.

...assuming it's still unresolved for you after all this time. :-)