The Ubuntu installer's startup portion is sometimes incompatible with certain graphics cards. Fixing it and getting to the Ubuntu Desktop to try or install it can often be surprisingly easy fix: the nomodeset parameter. To see if it works for you:
Ubuntu's installer 'when attempting to run in UEFI mode) will hang and stop due to different manufacturer's implementations of the UEFI specification and will hang in different ways.To identify if your machine is booting in installer UEFI mode you will see
The picture above actually only confirms your DVD/USB booted using UEFI and there will be some means in firmware settings to ensure drives are booted in order to make the UEFI installer run (a solution may possibly be as simple as ensuring SATA is set to AHCI) - check your vendors manual! Also check the UEFI Community Documentation Section 2.3 for more details.
What you need to do first is to disable SECURE BOOT in the firmware settings. If that does not get the Ubuntu installer running, try disabling anything mentioning UEFI in the firmware settings.Or
If you cannot find UEFI settings then enable CSM - this will disable the UEFI booting of the installer and then allow a legacy/BIOS install of Ubuntu.
Installing grub-efi afterwards will allow UEFI to be re-enabled. Again refer to UEFI Community Ubuntu Documentation at Section 4
Not all of these machines implement Secure Boot. Simply selecting UEFI in the BIOS settings will configure UEFI mode on hard drives. There is no solution for these errors and the workaround is to disable UEFI to enable the Ubuntu installer to run in legacy mode; after which boot-repair can be used to install grub-efi which then allows/needs UEFI switched back on before Ubuntu will boot using UEFI. Once again refer to the UEFI Community Ubuntu Documentation at Section 4
This usually happens because you have an Nvidia or AMD graphics card, or a laptop with Optimus or switchable/hybrid graphics, and Ubuntu does not have the proprietary drivers installed to allow it to work with these.
If you have a purple screen (maybe you need to set the nomodeset-option also?) and you have encrypted your complete Ubuntu installation, try to just type your encryption/LUKS-password after waiting some seconds (or minutes, just to be sure) and continue with a press on Enter. If this is successfull, you should see your Login-screen just a few seconds later.
After selecting boot options you have the opportunity to edit the boot flags manually using your keyboard. Replace quiet splash with no splash to get an idea of what step your system is failing at. Using that information search the forums or the internet for answers from the community.
The Default Ubuntu Way involves just typing in the terminal sudo apt-get install nvidia-current (For the current normal drivers) or sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-updates (For the latest current drivers). Just pick one.
the PPA way has the Latest bleeding bloody edge drivers. I mention this one since I am testing it in some use cases that relate to problems using TVs and 16:9/16:10 resolutions. To install this one do this:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa and press ENTER to accept a message you will receive. Then do sudo apt-get update. Lastly do sudo apt-get install nvidia-375. Note that you can not mix this one with the Ubuntu way. One will overwrite the other one.
Now if you happen to have any problems do the following via the terminal again but this time go to your home folder. In my case it is /home/cyrex, so I would cd /home/cyrex. In your case you should change that to your user and the apply the following:
What we did there was remove the monitors.xml to solve some resolution problems, remove the .nvidia-settings to fix some Nvidia config problems and remove the xorg.conf (Which is not really needed in the latest Ubuntu versions) to remove any badly configured options.
I had this problem last night. All of a sudden my system wouldn't boot up anymore. BIOS check would finish, then it would just hang there on a black screen with the cursor flashing. Left it there for several hours just in case. When that didn't work, I unplugged all my USB devices and all of a sudden it booted up fine again. I haven't narrowed it down exactly, but in my case it was either my USB hub or the iPod plugged into that USB hub that was causing it to hang.
To complicate things, since Ubuntu 11.10 there are two distinct methods to install with Wubi. The first way is using the Desktop ISO, which applies to all sub-flavours (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mythbuntu etc.) and also if you downloaded the Ubuntu ISO yourself.
Ignore Safe graphic mode as it applied to Ubuntu in 2008 and does nothing for the modern nvidia/radeon issue. Place your cursor on Normal mode and press E. Then edit the entry and insert nomodeset as shown here (look for it between noprompt and quiet splash in the middle; note there may be some other differences but don't change anything else - just add nomodeset):
NOTE: This only applies to the Installation; the next time you boot you have to override it again, and for this it will be the same as for a normal install (answered above). Make sure you hold Shift to make the Grub menu show though.
Method 2When you run wubi.exe standalone and install Ubuntu (not a sub-flavour), it downloads a pre-installed, compressed disk image with a default Ubuntu install, and then decompresses this to the size of the virtual disk. There is no grub.cfg setup yet so it uses the file \ubuntu\install\wubildr-disk.cfg for the first boot which you can edit and add nomodeset:
Note - if you've come to this thread after booting for the first time, it's possible that the grub.cfg has already been created (even if it froze up). In this case, editing the \ubuntu\install\wubildr-disk.cfg file will do nothing - it always checks for /boot/grub/grub.cfg inside the virtual disk first. So you should follow the instructions for the normal install above.
Note also that the Grub Menu is suppressed by default on Wubi installs (even though there are two operating systems - because you boot Ubuntu from Windows, and therefore adding a Windows entry from Ubuntu's Grub Menu makes no sense) so you have to press and hold the Shift key after selecting Ubuntu in order to display the Grub Menu. On Windows 8, it reboots after you elect to boot into Wubi, in which case, you should hold the Shift key after the BIOS posts.
(This is only for Windows 8 with BIOS - Wubi doesn't work with UEFI).
I also had this problem, or a similar one. It turned out that, for some reason, Ubuntu had started with the screen brightness on its lowest setting. If I went into a very dark room, I could see the screen just well enough to go to the "Brightness and Lock" control panel and turn the brightness up to where it should be.
I realize this is an old question, but it's also pretty general without any details about the specific hardware involved. That said, you can't file a bug or go about fixing things until you figure out some more details.
I thought I'd take a stab at this since I faced the issue and recovered from it pretty recently. I'll probably run through here again later and throw in some more info and simplify the steps, but the answer list is already pretty big, so I'll go easy on the screenshots.
Recovery mode is your friend, but you don't always need a single-user root session to solve things. In fact, you might just be able to do a normal console login by selecting "resume" without considering any of the other options on the recovery menu. The nice thing about a normal console session over the single-user root mode is that you can get multiple terminals running at once--Switch between them or open up new ones with Alt+F1, Alt+F2, etc. There's a good chance that it's a video driver issue which is preventing you from going into the graphical login, and it might just be a result of some upgrade you did before rebooting the computer.
You might go a couple of years at a time without experiencing similar issues, but it's a good idea to know your hardware and to be prepared to use the terminal. Basically there are two video drivers to worry about: the kernel driver and the xorg driver. Xorg is a video server that uses the x11 protocol to display things in full color with depth and all kinds of crazy effects--It's an abstraction layer between applications like the desktop environment or windowing managers and the kernel driver. The kernel driver is yet another abstraction layer, but it's a bit closer to communicating with the actual hardware.
It's the kernel's job (in this case, Linux) to pass messages between applications and the hardware. The drivers can either be compiled into the kernel or added in a more ad hoc way through kernel modules. Probably you're using modules unless you configured and compiled your own custom kernel. The kernel driver as a module gets loaded shortly after you boot up, which allows for easier upgrades when you power down to swap out a card. The good news is that there are some more or less standard tools that you can run from the command line to give you more information about those kinds of drivers, the actual hardware and whether they're loading: lspci, dmidecode and dmesg, to name a few. There are man pages (e.g., $man dmidecode) and many howtos on those kinds of tools, so I won't go into too much detail here for now.
Then there are the xorg drivers. To list what's available in the repositories, you might type apt-cache search xserver-xorg-video less to give you a list of all possible drivers. Piping it to less with the '' symbol which you can probably type by tapping the slash key while holding down shift (to be clear on what symbol this is), gives you the option to scroll back and forth through the list of drivers (with the arrow keys). To get more info on a specific driver, you might type apt-cache show xserver-xorg-video-vesa (to pick one at random). To install one, you could type apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-vesa and hope for the best. As of I don't know how many versions ago Xorg will try to load one of the installed drivers for you automatically, but under certain conditions you might have a configuration file lingering around in /etc/X11 called xorg.conf. So take a look and see if there's one there: ls /etc/X11/xorg.conf
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