I started up the Dell this morning and the Linux Mint logo came up like normal, but then it just stayed there, not progressing to the login window - not a great start to the day. Maybe it's because it's Friday the 13th?? I envisaged spending the whole day on solving this - or worse: spending the whole day reinstalling Mint and going through the entire setup process again. I was glad that I'd at least taken notes on certain aspects of the setup and bookmarked the sites I'd used for setup tips.

I tried rebooting and various options in Grub, but it didn't work. It was getting stuck after the Samba was loading, but that didn't look like the problem. Earlier in the log it showed:

Starting MDM Display Manager [fail]

A couple of other things said they'd failed also, but I figured I'd check this out first. I jumped on the Macbook (one of the benefits of having more than one computer) and googled it and came across http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=178979 on the Linux Mint forums which was almost identical to my problem.

After booting to a command prompt as root from Grub, I entered:


Then I exited the prompt and it continued to boot, but the resolution was way off. After rebooting again it was back to working correctly with the correct resolution.

I'm not sure how long it took to solve, but I think I was up and running in under an hour and everything was working perfectly again - maybe Friday the 13th means nothing after all.

Once again, the Linux Mint forums showed themselves to be a great resource - they've helped me out a lot so far.