How do I troubleshoot booting into black screen? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it?

I installed Lucid Lynx over PXE onto this dell server seemingly successfully, but booting from the HD results in a black, unpowered screen. There appears to be no network connectivity to the box either. It may have landed at a textual busybox type prompt, but I can't see it. Ctrl-Alt-Delete seems to reboot.

On my last attempt I held shift and the grub menu came up, but recovery mode produced the same results.

Should I drop into the grub prompt and give the kernel a magical boot option? Should I boot from a rescue cd and munge some bits on the HD? Give up and install windows?

Solution 1:

Here are a couple of "magical boot options" to try:

• nomodeset
• i915.modeset=0 xforcevesa

I'd remove quiet splash when trying these and only one at a time, not together as they'll likely conflict.

Edit: for an explanation of how to use these:

• When booting, hold left-Shift
• Highlight the first option and press e

• Go down to the line that looks like:

  /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.blah-generic root=UUID=blah ro quiet splash
  

• Replace quite splash with your boot option of choice.

If that works out well, you can make the changes to /etc/default/grub by editing the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT value. After saving, run sudo update-grub.