Black Screen with cross in the middle pls help.

Hi all,

I'm new here. I desperately need help. I bought a refurbished netbook & it didn't come supplied with recovery disk. All i get now when I turn it on is the acer welcome screen then the screen goes black with an X on it. I can move the x using the mouse.

Does anyone have any idea's what this is.

I've tried recoverying the system using boot info I found on another site but that doesn't work.

Most grateful for any help

Pam

 

Hi,

I observed the same, black screen and a cross movable by mouse.
This indicates a running x server (the graphic machine) without information what to to.
In my case I used the EZ Move function of thunar to move some files to the storage extension. Unfortunately this tool moves all files in the root of the user directory to the SD card.
On reboot the linpus sees only the files of the ssd. The SD card will be mounted later. So all user configuration files are gone.
Solution:
USB boot with puppy
mount ssd and SD card/ or copy files to the usb flash
copy files from the root directory of the SD card to /home/user/

thats all

 

thanks so much for the reply. However PC world who I bought it off finally came and took it back. I got a full refund eventually. Poor after sales service I thought. Very slow to respond to emails.

Regards

& thx again

Pam

 

Bert - you seem to know ...
I have the same problem as pammyt, however your answer makes no sense to me. I don't know how to "USB boot with puppy", nor how to mount the ssd and SD card! Could you please be more specifik for a non Linux expert?
I have tried with live cd:s with Linpus lite and Xubuntu, but they don't seem to recognize the SD card, and I can't find the catalog /home/user (because it's the live cd start?). I'm quite confident with Windows, but I don't understand the Linux file system and it's catalogs at all. I just finished installing Firefox 3.5 and Wine and was so happy when I moved these files with EZmove (stupid it doesn't warn)!

 

OK, I'm back. Realized I should google for Puppy and found Puppy Linux, and a method to boot from a USB stick. OK, I downloaded Puppy 4.2.1, burned a cd and tried to start from it (I have an external cd-burner), but the Acer one refused to even start from it. After several attempts it did, but the USB boot stick created didn't work, AA1 said "Missing operative system"! So I booted again from the cd, and followed Berts instructions - mounted (that wasn't too hard to figure out) the ssd and the SD and copied (with this operative system I could find the Linpus file system, that was hidden from Linpus lite, Mandriva and Xubuntu live cd:s). But when I restarted there was still a cross on the black screen.

Bert - you forgot something very important - to make sure that hidden files are shown before copying with your instructions. When I did that - my desktop is there and the AA1 works again! Thanks a lot!

So - if someone else has the same problem, follow Bert's excellent but maybe a bit too "know how" instructions, and make sure you include the hidden files when you copy from the root of your SD card. And if you have an external cd to connect to your AA1 it's a lot easier. It had trouble starting with the more advanced graphics, use the simpler one. And it didn't recognize the wireless LAN so it's no alternative to Linpus lite unless you know how to find and install the correct drivers (I don't).