Live CD won't boot on Lenovo ThinkPad E525

Question

I had Ubuntu 11.04 installed for a while and that worked fine. But when I try to boot from the Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD, the screen gets black after the purple background of what used to be the selection menu (where you could set boot options etc.). I tried to boot with nomodeset. It then boots fine, but as soon as X needs to be started for Ubiquity to display, the screen falls to black again. With noapic it starts almost fine (I can even hear the login sound), but still a black screen and no access to a tty.

My system specs:

Processor: AMD A4-3300M
RAM: 4 GB DDR3
Video card: ATI Radeon HD 6480G

Can somebody help me?

Solution 1

While I don't have the same laptop, I do have the same APU (A4-3300m | ATI Radeon HD 6480g).

I was having the same issue as you, but I was able to get Ubuntu 11.10 (fresh install) by doing the following:

1) Go here and download the alternate install liveCD: http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/ubuntu-releases/oneiric/

2) Boot and install from the alternate LiveCD

3) After installation, boot with nomodeset

4) Drop into TTY, log in as usual

5) Install fglrx: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install fglrx

6) After it's finished, just reboot and boot normally. You should be able to boot into Ubuntu 11.10.

Also, I should mention that everything will seem kind of sluggish. If you install compizconfig-settings-manager and turn off "Sync to Vblank" in General --> OpenGL, everything will be visibly faster and smoother.

Solution 2

I had similar problem. And I solved it like this:

• re-boot without the LiveCD to your current Ubuntu version, refresh the configuration of Grub with this command sudo update-grub

• then boot with your LiveCD 11.10

From what I've understood, GRUB manages the way to start Ubuntu when several versions have been installed. The command sudo update-grub will clean it, that way your LiveCd won't have problem to run.

Comments

[antivirtel]

Thanks, it inspired me to make the liveCD work. I'll use your idea in my answer!