This is an old set of hardware but it ran v19 OK and was working fine. On a whim I upgraded to v20.04 and upon reboot all I got was a black screen with a blinking cursor. No inputs worked, system was unresponsive.
After a bit of messing about with the Boot Repair Disc - which didn't seem to report anything suspicious, nor was it able to repair anything I thought I'd just go back to v19 (there's nothing on the machine that matters, it's all backed up on another physical disc in the case) so I pulled out the install discs I had burned and couldn't find v19 - no problems there was v17.10.
I ran it from the disc, no issue, worked fine. I installed it went well and rebooted to ... a black screen with a blinking cursor!
I then went back to the next oldest and even found an old xubuntu v9 that I remember was the first one I tried on this hardware - same result - runs off the cd, won't run when installed.
Damn, OK I decided to run Kill Disc on the hd and clean it all out, ran that last night and started again this morning with v17.10 - again, ran from the disc OK, did the install and - you guessed it, same black screen.
Now before I physically disconnect the back-up HD (grasping at straws here) and try again, is there anything else I should be doing to get back to a working Ubuntu? As far as I can tell all the hardware, although old, was working fine and is OK now - I could try another HD I suppose but I can't figure out what would have happened to the HD to make it so pedantic.
It's the lack of any useful feedback that's worrying me - where do you start when all you have a black screen?
Anyway, thanks in anticipation - I'm very much an enthusiastic self taught amateur here, so may be missing some fundamentals!
