Three days before I help my friends install ubuntu 8.04 on his new desktop while windows xp resides in anonther partition. I enabled the ATI-fglrx-driver and the 3D desktop cube. Everything worked well at that time.

But this evening I received an urgent call from him, he told me that he only got "white screen" after he make his system updated by clicking the red array at the top panel. I went to check. As what he said, after login, there is only white(with a little gray) screen presenting. But the most magic thing is that the 3D desktop keeps working, just a white cube, without anything on it.

It's really strange, what's going wrong?

Post the graphics part of lspci -vvv

fglrx has many bugs too. Is 3-D on the card supported by ati or radeon?

After further check, I found my friends delete some necessary packages by mistake. But he forgets the names. Is it still possible that his system can recover?

Login to a shell/recovery mode

#sudo apt-get check

#sudo apt-get upgrade

Usually the "white screen of death" is related to fglrx and Desktop effects. Disabling Desktop effects will usually handle this issue, also if you can, remove the card and install Nvidia..

IGF

I had the same problem after a Kernel update. I ran EnvyNG for my ATI card and it fixed the problem right away.