Please help!!!!

[Steve509]

My fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 just isn't working right. When I boot into 10.04
#1- Its much slower than 9.10 on starting up
#2- When I go into "Computer" all it sees is Floppy0 and File System
#3- When I try to Restart or Shutdown, the box comes up to put in my password, then ubuntu comes right back up. I have to hit the restart button on the computer to get out of ubuntu.

When I first installed 10.04, the new "pink" background came up and then a box saying "Installation failed
The installer encountered an unrecoverable error. A desktop session will now be run so that you may investigate the problem or try installing again."

The session is run but doesn't stay on the screen long enough to read, then the ubuntu screen comes back up and i'm able to install it.
Has anyone else had this problem? and does anyone know how to fix it?
Thanks for any help, Steve509

[RobertBradbury]

The message doesn't contain enough information. First it doesn't mention whether you are running an x86 or a x64 architecture. Second it doesn't mention whether you can get to a console shell (ctrl-alt-F1) or launch an xterm/vterm session. Then you would need to look at (a) the output of dmesg, e.g.
dmesg | more
which would give you a log of the boot process (e.g. what the boot sees). One needs to look for drivers that failed to run/load properly.

It isn't clear whether the system actually sees the hard drive, e.g.
ls -l /dev/hd?* /dev/sd?*
and whether it sees partitions on the hard drive, e.g.
fdisk /dev/hda
or
fdisk /dev/sda

If you have an old CD which boots properly and a new CD which doesn't boot properly I'd save the outputs after booting, e.g. boot old CD; start a shell; dmesg > /tmp/old-dmesg.lst; sync; reboot and follow it with the same thing for the new CD only use dmesg > /tmp/new-dmesg.lst and then compare them using something like:
sdiff -s -w80 /tmp/old-dmesg.lst /tmp/new-dmesg.lst | more
to see where the differences may be.

This will be difficult if you are a Window Manager only (e.g. Gnome/KDE/...) user as diagnosing boot problems is a little bit like fixing a car -- one generally has to look under the hood and know what to do with what you see.

[devils casper]

#1- Its much slower than 9.10 on starting up

Execute this in Terminal

lspci | grep -i vga

Post output here.

#2- When I go into "Computer" all it sees is Floppy0 and File System

What does Places Menu show?

sudo fdisk -l

#3- When I try to Restart or Shutdown, the box comes up to put in my password, then ubuntu comes right back up. I have to hit the restart button on the computer to get out of ubuntu.

Try disabling ACPI.