Hi,

I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop for a few months now and never had a problem, until yesterday i turned on my laptop and after i input my password i get a brown screen and mouse pointer, and i can move the pointer but gnome never loads, i dont even get a splash screen.
But i did some messing around, and i decided to make a new account, to see would it get me anywhere, and with the new account it loads and lets me in perfect, so i decided to backup my info on another partition, and just do a clean re-install but when the live cd loaded up i got the brown screen with a movable mouse pointer again but when i made a new account on the live cd that worked too but i couldnt install with the permissions on the new account, really confused over this, cause i havnt made any hardware changes or anything,expect i got a usb sound card and it messed the sound settings up for me, but it worked for a while after that so i dont think thats it, i could do with the fact i messed something up, but the live cd does the same thing, does the live cd take any settings if there is an existing install or anything?

Any ideas, because im doing some important college work with the old account, and am using screenshots so finishing it in windows would be a pain.

Any help is appreciated.

-Mark

Ok i just realised that the new working account i created cant access the sound card i'm getting errors about streaming, plugins, hardware the whole package, so i think the USB soundcard might have messed things up a bit, but i still cant see how the live cd wont load either, i dont have the sound card plugged in when i boot off the live cd. Any ideas?

BTW i'm running dapper, and that was the live cd i was using, and this morning i tried the breezy live cd and got the same problem.