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I have burned a Ubuntu disk and am booting from it on my Mac. However, it keeps going to a black screen with a single yellow character on a burgundy background. Usually an S and a weird ñ.

When booting it always displays a little icon in the bottom of the screen which looks like a keyboard, followed by an arrow, followed by a person in a Circe.

Sometimes the install/check disk/etc menu comes up before the weird yellow symbol, sometimes it doesn't at all.

When the symbol is up, no amount of pressing buttons or anything works.

Is this a Mac hardware problem? Is my disk bad?

Thanks,

Sam

samiles
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  • I've been getting this on a MacBook Pro 5,3 (late 2009). I've seen a lowercase 'a', a '', and several different colors. – Evan Johnson Jul 03 '13 at 14:52
  • Update 1: I just tried hitting the down arrow when I saw the Circe per this answer and I'm making progress. – Evan Johnson Jul 03 '13 at 15:01
  • Update 2: 'nomodeset' works for me. I've seen a loading screen, a bunch of text with warnings about a few drivers highlighted, and now finally the Ubuntu Desktop! – Evan Johnson Jul 03 '13 at 15:06
  • Update 3: I've managed to get Ubuntu installed on my hard drive, but I have to boot in "recovery mode" then select the "start normally" option. I'm hoping this will change when I connect the laptop to the internet and start downloading the appropriate device drivers. – Evan Johnson Jul 03 '13 at 17:31

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I recently (July 2013) had this same problem while trying to boot Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise) from a new live CD on a MacBook Pro 5,3 (2009 15" model, 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, GeForce 9600M GT and 9400M graphics cards). After finding and reading this answer for "My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it?" I began following the steps under "2. Black/purple screen when you try to boot the LiveCD" and it worked perfectly. After installation I could only get it to boot properly by selecting the "recovery mode" option in GRUB and then choosing "Resume - Resume normal boot," but downloading and installing the recommended updates and drivers solved that problem.

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Evan Johnson
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