I have an Acer 5630 laptop, which has been a great ubuntu/vista box for a few years. The only flakey hardware is the 1.3 MegaPixel video cam. Annoying but not really a problem, as it was such bad quality anyway.
Everything was going great, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 when it came out, and then I tried to “improve” the graphics. I don’t remember what I did, but I ended up with it always booting into a frozen video, with hash garbage on the screen. Tonight, I did a google search for “Ubuntu fix for no video on boot” and found a reference to removing the following package xorg-driver-fglrx, well that was the magic incantation. It worked. And everything is great again.
Boot into Recovery mode, drop down into a root console and type apt-get remove –purge xorg-driver-fglrx then reboot, or type init 5 to get into multi-user mode. Everything should be back to normal.
