Hey all!

My girlfriend has a POS HP laptop that was sold with Vista home... it barely runs vista, and HP includes about 900 helpful software pieces with their install disc. A while back I used an old XP pro disc and formatted the laptop with XP Pro. Took me a while to find drivers for everything as HP doesn't support the XP platform on this notebook. Anyhow, this time around when formatting my XP serial isn't working (annoying because it is legit). Too difficult to get live help from a human with microsoft, and I wanted to try Ubuntu...

I created a boot drive USB key and tried this out. The initial screen where it says Ubuntu in the bottom right while loading looked fine... but the next screen was really garbled. It was asking me for language, but the screen was not very legible. I'll link to a pic.

It does this for both trying to install as well as just boot from the USB key. I also tried making a disc for booting... same problem.

Any help is appreciated!

http://chris.offtone.com/ubuntu%20problem.jpg

Well if the GPU is from nvidia, intel, or ati, you could try disabling kernel modesetting by passing "nomodeset" as an option to the kernel before booting. That *might* help, or it might be completely unrelated to KMS :-)

Adam

Thanks for the reply! I should have mentioned that I'm using Ubuntu 10.04.

As for your suggestion... I believe this has Nvidia graphics. The previous format I used Nvidia drivers.

As for "disabling kernel modesetting by passing "nomodeset" as an option to the kernel before booting" ... can you explain how to do that? I'm not terribly adept with computers.