Ok I tried to upgrade from gibbon to heron and it failed, I rolled back the changes (it did it automatically) and submitted a ticket. Now my boot menu has *.24.* and *.22.* to choose from, and both have the same problem.

The screen is horizontally striped, viewable, black, viewable black. and there are 5 or 6 cursors on screen (each with their own superimposed desktop). All in all there is no means of viewing anything on screen. I killed and restarted gdm, and rebooted to .24 and .22.

The neighborhood's power died and when I rebooted it this happened.

I do have ssh installed, so any ideas on how to fix this?

BTW I am using a NVIDIA driver, how can I reset that to the linux generic driver via terminal?

Thanks

-SS

bump......

Don't bump -- it's counter-productive:

1. It takes you off the 0-reply list.
2. LQ auto-bumps you 3 times anyway.

What you describe is almost certainly the wrong resolution being passed to / used by your video driver.

I don't suppose Ubuntu has an Xorg repair wizard on the Live CD. (MEPIS does, but I think they, Canonical, haven't copied that idea yet.) There is a totally outside chance that a SimplyMEPIS 6.5.02 (& only 6.5.02) Live CD might be able to fix your problem. -- Reason, 6.5.02 uses the Dapper repos, has the Xorg repair wizard, & can run the nVidia driver on boot.

Have you tried Ctrl+Alt+KeyPadPlus & Ctrl+Alt+KeyPadMinus to see if you can get something readable?

Do you still have a Gutsy Live CD?
What happens when you boot w/ it?

I hope that you saved your Xorg / XWindows configuration file. If you didn't, it's most certainly a resolution issue.

Some systems recognize "Ctrl + Alt + Numeric keypad '+' or '-' " as a command to change resolutions. Just for grins, try that.

Otherwise, it's dig-deeper time.

Look for logfiles in "/var/log" ...

Ok alt+ctr+ -/+ didn't do anything.

Here are the logs in /var/log, which do you want?
acpid
acpid.1.gz
acpid.2.gz
acpid.3.gz
acpid.4.gz
apache2
apparmor
apt
auth.log
auth.log.0
auth.log.1.gz
auth.log.2.gz
auth.log.3.gz
auth.log.4.gz
bip
bittorrent
boot
bootstrap.log
btmp
btmp.1
cups
daemon.log
daemon.log.0
daemon.log.1.gz
daemon.log.2.gz
daemon.log.3.gz
debug
debug.0
debug.1.gz
debug.2.gz
debug.3.gz
dist-upgrade
dmesg
dmesg.0
dmesg.1.gz
dmesg.2.gz
dmesg.3.gz
dmesg.4.gz
dpkg.log
dpkg.log.1
dpkg.log.2.gz
dpkg.log.3.gz
faillog
fontconfig.log
fsck
gdm
installer
kern.log
kern.log.0
kern.log.1.gz
kern.log.2.gz
kern.log.3.gz
lastlog
lpr.log
mail.err
mail.info
mail.log
mail.warn
messages
messages.0
messages.1.gz
messages.2.gz
messages.3.gz
news
proftpd
pycentral.log
samba
scrollkeeper.log
scrollkeeper.log.1
scrollkeeper.log.2
secure
syslog
syslog.0
syslog.1.gz
syslog.2.gz
syslog.3.gz
syslog.4.gz
syslog.5.gz
syslog.6.gz
udev
unattended-upgrades
user.log
user.log.0
user.log.1.gz
user.log.2.gz
user.log.3.gz
wtmp
wtmp.1
wvdialconf.log
xferlog
Xorg.0.log
Xorg.0.log.old
Xorg.20.log
Xorg.20.log.old

I also have windows on the other Hd, let me boot to that to make sure its the OS and not the monitor, I'll try the livecd as well.

Alright I found a recovery mode on boot, and used x-server repair (it said setting up swap partition failed... which was weird, but everything worked alright), then I used dpkg repair broken packages. It found problems with G++ and openssl, it downloaded replacement packages.
I then booted and everything was back to normal.

Thanks!

You're very welcome.


Tell me more -- I use MEPIS/KDE not Ubuntu/Gnome & am not familiar w/ the facility you mention.

There's really not a whole lot more to tell.

There is an entry for each version of ubuntu, one says generic (Boot regularly), the other says Recovery Mode.

I selected recovery mode and it gave me 4 options, X-server, dpkg, one other I can't remember, and Boot Normally.

No CDs were involved, it was a part of the OS on the hard disk.