Ubuntu 14.04 hangs on purple screen

Question

I have Windows 8 and Ubuntu 14.04 dual boot on my laptop. (Ubuntu is a recent installation.) Windows works fine, but Ubuntu hangs at the purple screen when I try to boot it. The laptop has a NVidia video card and I've been using it for GPU computations on Ubuntu quite a bit lately. Any ideas how to fix this?

Answer 1

First open Ubuntu console using

Ctrl-Alt-F1

Then remove nVidia drivers

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*

After doing this use following commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nvidia-xxx

please use your nVidia driver model for xxx, for more details follow this thread, and this if you are having more problems.

Answer 2

It's not necessary that you can have this problem for Nvidia. I don't have Nvidia, but I still got this problem, which I solved by following these steps.

The following steps should be taken:

1. Check that you can still do this at startup:

   Hold down (or repeatedly tap) the Shift key while you boot. GRUB should present you with a menu. Choose the second option, to go into Recovery mode, then select Drop to root shell prompt.

2. Look for the log of removed packages. In the terminal you can input the following code:

   sudo gedit /var/log/apt/history.log
   

3. Find the removed packages and then run:

   sudo apt-get install package1 package2 package3
   

4. If confirmed through vim almost a screen full of uninstalled packages for example xserver-xorg-video-s3-lts-raring, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse

   Thus to install the uninstalled packages, use a command like this example:

    sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-s3-lts-raring xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse  ## Add more packages to the end of the command as required. 
   

Note: Always have a space as a delimiter character between package1 package2 etc.