BleepingComputer.com: Ubuntu 9.04 not booting

I am real new at Linux and loaded Ubuntu 9.04 as a dual boot on my older machine with XP. It had been working great all week. I was just getting
somewhat used to it. I was using it last nite, playing music, videos, just seeing what all was working that was imported from My Documents in XP.

I loaded some apts that looked interesting, (I don't remember what they all were) but all was working great.

Today, when i got home from work, go to turn the computer on and by default it supposed to boot into Ubuntu. I get the splash screen, the lines slides all
the way over, but before it launches, I get a garbled screen that kinda flashes slowly 3 times, then locks an another totally garbled screen. (a few times, the flashing screen
would show a partial "Windows is now shutting down" screen, then the locked garbled screen you could see several little "ubuntus" at the top, and blue Windows looking
on the bottom half.)

I can boot into Windows XP just fine tho!

I tried changing the moniter cable, shutting down the Windows computer completely before restarting. I booted into the Ubuntu Recovery screen, tried doing a few of those
"fixes", nothing is working. I even ran a virus scan in XP to make sure that wasn't causing any boot problems, it came up clean.

Any ideas out there?

Thanks ahead of time!

Terry

Hmmm.... somethings not right.

We need mor info. There may be some useful error info in the system log. Try this, boot using the recovery option. Then, once logged in type:

dmesg|tail

Copy down the info that shows and post it here.

I'm assuming I choose "Drop to Root Shell Prompt"?

I typed in dmesg tail (no straight line?) and got a screen with a bunch of stuff that would take forever to write it all down.

At the Root prompt, after typing that in, this is just part of what it shows.

[ 12.823434] adding 3004112k swap on /dev/sda7. Priority: -1 Extent: 1 accross: 3004112k

is that anything like what we are looking for?

Hmmm... not very helpful.

Let me think for a bit, my brain is offline at the moment.

Should I have typed in sudo or something to pull up an error file?
And doing it at the Drop to Root Shell Prompt in the Recovery Menu theright place to do it?

I was also asking around in the Ubuntu website forum, and some seem to think it has to do with the dual booting.

No, the Root Shell is what we wanted, and when you're root, you don't need sudo at all.

Ubuntuforums.org is an excellent place to find help. Lots and lots of Ubuntu users who are much smarter than I are there.