Black Screen on Login

Question

I have serached around, but no fix could help me. Here's what happened:

A few days ago, for no reason, I couldn't see the login screen on my Ubuntu 12.04. nor do anything but reboot using CTRL+ALT+DEL. After reading some suggestions and experimenting, this is what I got so far:

• If I go to the recovery mode and then choose "resume normal boot" I can see the boot up text, and it stops at "Checking battery state".
• If I choose "failsafe graphics mode" it stops on a different point, one of the last messages being from xserver saying "fatal server error no screens found"
• I realized that I can get to the desktop if when the black screen appears I use CTRL+ALT+F1 and blindly type my username and password, and then use "startx". I get to my desktop, but no menus at all. At least I can use the terminal this way.
• I tried reinstalling xorg and nVidia drivers (using the current ones) but it didn't help
• I deleted the ~/.config/monitors.xml and ~/.config/monitors.xml~ but that only got my resolution to reset to the default one AFTER blind login and use of startx

Any suggestions, anyone? Any logs I need to provide you with?

I would like to note an important piece of info: I had my GeForce 6600GT and then upgraded to GeForce 8800GT. IT died after like three weeks, and then I put back my old 6600GT. It worked fine the first day, so I was thinking if it's possible to install OLDER nVidia drivers (like version 220.xx), using the terminal, could that help? And how do I do that?

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: I managed to try all the driver versions available in "Additional Drivers" but none helped. Still, the only way to access the desktop is via startx and no menus are shown.

Solution 1

This is what helped in the end: I removed lightdm and installed GDM. After reboot, it worked:

• When the HDD stops loading and the black screen appears, type CTRL+ALT+F1
• Type your username and password in the terminal prompt. If you can't even see it, like I couldn't, type your username, press ETNER, then type the password, press ENTER.
• Start XORG by typing startx
• When the desktop appears, open terminal using CTRL+ALT+T
• Remove lightdm using sudo apt-get remove lightdm
• Wait for it to finish, then install GDM using sudo apt-get install gdm
• After it's done, use sudo reboot to restart the computer and GDM should be working

Does anyone know what caused this out of the blue and will I be able to use lightdm again?

Solution 2

did whatever Tesla said but instead of installing GDM simply reinstalled lightdm after removing it:

sudo apt-get install lightdm

This helped solve the problem for me

Comments

[ddoxey]

I had a similar hangup when booting Ubuntu 13.04 64bit. I followed this procedure and it saved the day for me.

[Admin]

This didn't work entirely for me (Ubuntu 13.10 64bit) but what did was reinstalling lightdm after the removal step.

[Tesla]

In the end I ended up installing lightdm again as I figured out that the bug was initiated after editing the xorg.conf file to stop my monitor from switching to the native resolution on boot (which was too high for my GPU at the time).

[stidmatt]

I tried to change to gdm and now I can't even access the login screen.

[Sadik]

what if the desktop doesn't appear after startx?