I have spent most of the day in doing an upgrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04.2LTS. All seemed to go well without hiccups (but several cups of coffee!). However when I tried to log-in, using my existing username and password from 9.10, some disk operation happened and I was returned to the log-in page. All very strange. I used Gnome Failsafe and all the system worked OK (within the constraints of the Failsafe option). My password worked as an Administrator and I also reissued it from the Terminal without making any improvement. It would seem that there is a bug somewhere in the loading software that directs me back to log-in in a loop which ought not to be there. Any ideas?

If you can login to a failsafe session, but not a regular session then you have a problem with your video driver.

What card to you have and what driver are you using?

Hi Andrew!. & thanks,

The installation is on an elderly laptop which was originally running Windows 98SE. According to the literature the Video driver \W9x. There is no video card as such, it is all in the motherboard.

I have been successfully running Ubuntu 8.04 and 9.10 without any trouble.

I am looking into reinstalling 10.04 and reinserting my original user-name and password which was not necessary with the upgrade using 9.10 Update Manager. It looks like a potential problem with my use of a separate partition for /home,due to the fact that I formatted the sda3 as ext3 instead of leaving it alone. Time will tell.

On advice, I have ordered a 10.04.2 Desktop CD from Linux Store to reinstall the system. (Downloads of this size a bit uncertain in these parts) It would appear to be tidiest way of overcoming the problem. It will at least give me the opportunity to reinstate Log-in user-name and password directly instead of relying on the upgrade to do it for me. Hopefully that will see me in good stead until 2012 when ir will be needed again.

I had not come across the failsafe facility in Gnome until now. Has this been written up somewhere? It certainly has got me out of a hole now. I was familiar with the Windows Safe mode but had not seen the equivalent here. It appears to run 10.04.2 very well, are there any operational restrictions to it? I amusing it to post this to you now.

Hi Andrew and anyone else who might read this thread, I am no further with my log-in failure problem and any information about Failsafe Gnome and am getting a bit desperate. Surely someone has come up against this, I cannot believe that I am unique!!!!!

any information about Failsafe Gnome :

How it differs is that it uses the settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.failsafe which for me contains:

So, basically, on my system, it uses the fbdev driver as opposed to ati driver.

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Andrew, Thanks for quick reply. I have looked at my files but /etc/X11/ does not have an entry for xorg.conf.failsafe in although the Failsafe Gnome is working here now!!

I can confirm that the log-in problem is still with me. I have tried to use a LiveCD 10.04.2 which behaves like the installed version in this respect. The CD did (eventually) work correctly on an old XP Tower with no demand for a log-in. This makes it sure that the problem is elsewhere.

I also have the same shut-down problem that I had with 8.04 which was "cured" by (I think) of adding a line to fstab something like: acpi=force. I must look up the original correspondence, if I can still find it. Would it be likely that my pre-2000 BIOS is doing the same thing with 10.04.2? The problem was that on selecting shut-down, all the proper things happened but the system just stuck with a blank display but with power on. Hitting the power button does the job but I believe could do mischief if done too quickly, so I don't!