black screen *with cursor*

I was running Pidgin, Firefox 3, and Transmission from the xfce desktop on fairly modified Linpus, when Pidgin started flaking out, slowing down, and finally quit responding. I couldn't do anything with it, so I killed it from the process manager. Its status went to "uninterruptible" for a bit, then quit. I decided I was done with Firefox for now (then?), so I went to close it, to find that it too wouldn't respond. Again, trying to kill it through process manager gave me "uninterruptible" for half a minute. I decided to see what else was going batty, so I hit the home button, to find that my desktop icons (previously behind Transmission) were missing. Figuring the best thing for an unstable system would be a restart, I right-clicked to quit, but the menu didn't pop up. So I tried the tray icon. Still nothing. I pressed the power button to power it down when the shutdown dialog from the tray icon finally popped up, where I chose to restart.

It restarted, ran through BIOS and the blue Aspire ONE splash screen, then gave me a black desktop, other than the cursor. I waited around, found that the cursor and Fn+F6 for screen off work, but no menus, no hardware controls for volume, brightness, sleep, etc. Rebooting doesn't help.

It's not a completely dead screen obviously, like I've heard can happen with BIOS updates, so I'm holding out some hope that some knowledgeable soul here can steer me right, if not walk me through what needs to be done. Unfortunately, I thought I hadn't done anything risky enough to date to be arsed to backup, and I'd really rather not have to reinstall.

Thanks in advance, I hope.

 

I have a similar problem. I'm pretty new at Linux, so I don't really know what's going on, but maybe someone can point me in the right direction of solving my problem. So, I'll be using Firefox 3, and I'll notice the google search bar isn't working, and then the back button stops working and all my bookmarks disappear. Then my xfpanel launchers will disappear. It is especially weird, because this has happened about 6 times and each time it has been at about 1am. Each time this has happened, I have attempted an fwbackup system restore, and then lose my entire desktop, reboot and then get stuck on blue acer screen. Each time I've had to just reinstalled linpus. It may be noteworthy that I've ran the custom desktop script that's in this forum. Does anyone know what this is about?

 

Do you have a bootable Linux USB.
Use that to boot and then 'chroot /dev/sda1 /bin/bash'.

 

I booted from a live CD for Ubuntu Hoary (which wouldn't load X for some reason), and it said that it couldn't find that directory. Should I try another distro, or was this directed at the other previous post?

 

Well, looks like I'ma have to reinstall. :|

 

I have the same problem after I was installing ssl for pidgin and my AA1 went into standby mode during installation. Everything was messed up afterwards. When I rebooted all I got was the blank screen. I need to recover some files from the unit before I reinstall. How do I do this? Thanks.

 

I'm sorry I don't have anything to contribute on that front. I have the SSL problem with pidgin also, preventing me from using MSN and Gtalk-- what SSL support were you installing?

 

I've had the same problem off and on for some time now. It makes no sense, but I find if you just restart the thing 10 times or so, it eventually powers back up and starts working again. Again, why this works makes no sense, it shouldn't, but it has on my machine.

 

Here's a wild guess. Maybe repeated attempts to startup finally reaches the fsck mount count on that drive, forcing a fsck that corrects the problem? If this is what is bringing you success, then it's obvious that something is corrupting the disk.

Learn about forced fsck here ...

http://slackwiki.org/Forced_Fsck

Cheers.

 

This won't help any of you now, but if you want to minimise the damage if something like this happens again then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and remove the line that says 'Option "DontVTSwitch" "yes"'. When that's done and you've restarted, you can get to a terminal at any time after xwindows has started by pressing ctrl+alt+f1, even if all you get is a black screen with a cursor (press alt+f2 to return to the xwindows display). Then more often than not on the terminal you'll see an error showing at what point the boot process failed and you'll be able to fix it. It happened to me once and the fault was one corrupt config file. Luckily I'd removed the dontvtswitch line, so I was able to delete the corrupt file, reboot, and it was recreated without any problems.

 

Hrmm.
I still haven't reinstalled any OS, because I've been waiting/hoping for Kuki to come along, but I appreciate the tip, woogal! I'll be sure to do that.

 

After being stuck in "blank screen with cursor" for the second time in one month and facing another system recovery, I decided to spend more time in forums.. Lots of messages suggested to update bios, but bios seems to run fine until the blank screen, so I went for fsck and... THANKS A LOT, fsck took only 4' and SOLVED!!!

How I did it:
I equipped an USB stick with a 150 megs linux operating sytem from http://www.slax.org/
I booted it up, then silply

Code:

umount /dev/sdc1
fsck -C /dev/sdc1

fsck echoed about 30-40 inodes fixed then I was able to reboot linpus.

Suspected causes:
I heard about suspend or hibernate functions not properly/cleanly working, but since there is often a little 2 year old lady circliring around AAO, my suspects are on her little fingers ;-)

 

These SSD drives appear to be particularly vulnerable to file corruption. I don't know why? Possibly because they write so slowly resulting in processes stopping before files can be properly updated? Sometimes a fsck might not fix the problem, as I experienced on a friend's system the other day. But it is certainly one thing that should be tried before giving up and doing a full recovery of the system, losing everything that you had on the drive. A good backup is the ultimate answer to protecting oneself from the fragility of these SSD drives, imho.

Cheers.

 

That FSCK thing really helped! Thnx for that!

 

Hi,

As for cancelling the option 'Option "DontVTSwitch" "yes"', I would suggest that you simply comment the line with a # in front of the line. And make a copy of the file previously, with

cp -p xorg.conf xorg.conf-org

What is also useful is to uncomment the lines (remove the # in front of the line) in /etc/inittab where you can get extra terminal sessions:

3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3

And the following lines, but IMPORTANT, do not uncomment the second line, because you won't be able to come back with ALT+F2

So if you uncomment the other lines, you will get standard terminal sessions with ALT+F3 or ALT+F4 ALT+F5 ALT+F6

This is the normal behavior of Linux. Log in as root and use your password. You could also create other users if you like with

adduser name

then change the password for the new user with

passwd name

Hope that helps,

Pierre Forget