I just upgraded (not clean install) my Ubuntu 7.10 Laptop to 8.04 both 64-bit editions. My laptop is an Acer Aspire 5100-5973 (Turion TL50 CPU, ATI Radeon Xpress 1100, 1GB DDR2).

When I boot up normaly, either the hard drive indicator starts to blink really fast (as it normally does), then goes dark and nothing happens (even after 5 minutes), or the HD indicator stays a solid "on", but I can't hear the hard drive being accessed and the system hangs also. In either situation, the screen goes from being blank to progressively becoming random shades of grey.

However, if I choose to boot in recovery mode, everything boots normally as soon as I go into a window where it gives me 3 options(by memory):

• NTPD (network time protocol daemon) (Which is what I have to click to keep booting)
• push to bring me to a prompt with root privileges
• Some sort of Xorg reconfiguration. (which I have selected a few times. It reconfigures a default version of Xorg and brings me to the same three options)

So if I press the first option, it boots up the system "in recovery mode."

Question: While I do not see any performance difference and I seem to have access to everything, am I somehow missing out on anything while in "Recovery mode"?

I'm fine with booting in recovery mode, until some permanent fix is found.

Things that have changed with this Upgrade:

• In my previous installation, the ATI restricted driver did not work in the 64-bit edition and I now have it working;
• Since I never had access to a graphics card in my last installation, I Had "visual effects" turned off (they are now on full).

Any idea how to get it to boot normally, (preferably with the ATI driver active)? or

Do I suffer (other than the mild inconvenience of clicking an extra few buttons at boot up) a performance or functionality loss for being in "recovery mode"?

Thank you for any help or information.

PS: I'll be tinkering with settings to try to find a work around on my own, so if I'm offline during that period, it doesn't mean I wont get around to your request for additional details. (This will be the case for the next half hour or so.)

EDIT: I booted using a slightly earlier Kernel, and it booted the GUI normally, then Gnome would report an error. I assume gnome requires the later version of the Kernel. So I think that when the Kernel is updated, my situation should be solved.

Goodnight. (Any addition to this thread will have to wait until tomorrow.)

Waaaaaay to complicated for me, sorry.

Oh, don't let this poorly reflect on Linux and/or Ubuntu. Its just that I'm playing with fire a little using the 64-bit edition AND trying to use the graphic card(which is not needed for my application).

(Thanks for bumping the thread though, Kasillas88. Though to be honest a thread in the PC forum will hover on top of the topics, like an angel for a long time, just waiting for the right person to see it.)

Goodnight.

(For those that read the post when It was first posted, I added this a few minutes ago:
"EDIT: I booted using a slightly earlier Kernel, and it booted the GUI normally, then Gnome would report an error. I assume gnome requires the later version of the Kernel. So I think that when the Kernel is updated, my situation should be solved.

Goodnight. (Any addition to this thread will have to wait until tomorrow.) "

Did you mess up your xorg.conf file? (/etc/X11/xorg.conf)
I think ubuntu has a command to regenerate that file if it is configured wrong. It sounds like you have a video driver problem, but I'm not sure.  I don't know what ubuntu's 'recovery mode' is (gentoo doesn't have one..you just boot into the command prompt with no X if you have problems) - does it give you a gui? Is the gui really slow and laggy? What did you upgrade from?

ATI cards can be really finicky at times with linux. You might want to also try asking in the official ubuntu forums.

Thanks for the responce, Epsilon72.
When you go into Ubuntu's recovery mode, one of the three options that pop up is to have it auto-reconfigure Xorg(it saves your previous settings in a backup file). Maybe I could mess around with the Xorg config, but with Ubuntu, I never have had a need to as the default settings it chooses for me have always worked since 2005 at least. (The same cannot be said for when I was trying to run BSD's on my laptops which is the last time I had to change a Xorg configuration.)

I am pretty sure it is the video driver since it is not lauched in recovery mode. To answer your questions about Ubuntu's recovery mode, it fully boots the gui( gnome) and everything seems to run completely normally at normal performance. The only thing I'm trully lacking is the video card and the fancy "visual effects" are turned off. Neither of which is important to me since I don't really care about eye candy in computing and I don't use the computer for gaming. So the GNOME gui loads fully (for my needs) without any performance issues.

I updated from a fully up to date version of the last release (7.10) using the update manager. The only problem that occured during the update was a problem with the network time protocol, which I've reinstalled from scratch since.

I guess I'll have to live with the few extra button clicks that recovery mode necessitates. since to be honest, the only thing I appear to miss is esthetics(eye candy) I don't care for.

If I really get annoyed and have the time, I'll scour the Official forums like you said. I was just hoping someone here could tell me if recovery mode was really more gimped than it appeared to be. (But since I'm satisfied running recovery mode, it doesn't really matter) :)

OK, i see. It could be just that your card doesn't work with the new drivers. In fact, I think there was another recent cutoff of old ATI cards that had their support dropped...but I could be mistaken. You could probably eliminate the clicks for recovery mode for the time being by changing the driver entry in xorg.conf to "radeon" (I think that's it anyway..) but you still won't have the effects.

If you get annoyed enough and want the effects back, try downgrading the fancypants binary ati driver to the version that worked before.  Of course, there's a possibility it may be a problem with something else, but barring any error output files that's my best guess.