Occasional blank screen after boot up!

[oxf]

This little problem on my desktop is happening only occasionally. Most of the time it boots up fine without problem. What happens is this: the PC boots up, after the GRUB there is a very quick scrolling of boot commands/status down the screen (maybe errors? but too quick to read) and after boot the display is blank. My only option then is crash the system, after which it boots up fine again. I would say this only happens about 1 in 15-20 boot attempts so its a little difficult to get a handle on.

At this point I have very little information to go on so I'm wondering if there's anything I can do or log or anything else to diagnose and start to see what might be happening?

Could it be a video card issue. When I look in System>Administration>Hardware Drivers I see I have three Nvidia drivers to choose from, none of which are enabled at this point. Right now I'm using whatever was installed by default when I installed Jaunty a few days back. Should I try one of these and if so how do I decide? Or is this nothing to do with the problem?

The other thing I should point out is that on boot up I get the "MS Bios bug error 8254 timer unable to connect to IO APIC" I get this on every boot but was advised to ignore it as it doesn't seem to be affecting anything.

So any ideas on how to start diagnosing this issue?
Thanks

Jaunty 9.04
Acer Aspire L100
Video Card: Nvidia GEforce 6150 LE

[cody2]

i'm having kind of the same problem. after i activated the beryl advanced desktop effects, my screen started turning black. i cant do anything now. once my desktop boots up completely, if i move my mouse over anything clickable i.e.: system, icons, anything, it turns whatever i'm trying to click black. everything my mouse touches turns black now.

this is so aggrivating someone please help.

also if i just sit there and wait after the the entire screen turns black, it appears again, only completely upside down. and then nothing is clickable...

[oxf]

i'm having kind of the same problem. after i activated the beryl advanced desktop effects, my screen started turning black. i cant do anything now. once my desktop boots up completely, if i move my mouse over anything clickable i.e.: system, icons, anything, it turns whatever i'm trying to click black. everything my mouse touches turns black now.

this is so aggrivating someone please help.

also if i just sit there and wait after the the entire screen turns black, it appears again, only completely upside down. and then nothing is clickable...

You have my sympathies but I think you are experiencing a --completely-- different problem from what I described in my OP. Maybe a separate post would be in order.

If anyone has any thoughts on my original question I'd like to hear them. I'm wondering about a video card issue?

[oxf]

I'm just wondering. Is there any log saved of the boot process that would indicate errors?