Take the 2-minute tour ×  I'm currently having a problem with my
bootup process that is growing progressively worse as time goes
on:  While booting, it does a few minutes of hard-drive reading.
During that, instead of showing a boot splash screen, it shows
various dashes and dots, as if the video card isn't recognizing.
The splash screen actually has colors similar to the splash
screen (purple), it simply is garbled. It then does a few
minutes of hard-drive reads, and if I leave it long enough,
sometimes it boots into the desktop (and auto-logs-in).
Sometimes, unfortunately, it just hangs on that garbled screen
and reads from the hard-drive forever.  Notably, I've also
stopped being able to access grub during bootup (perhaps it is
just not displayed correctly by the video, hard to tell).  This
is a symptom that has grown over the course of various ubuntu
upgrades, at least I suspect that the upgrade process is leaving
behind cruft. So, is there a safe way for me to "refresh" the
boot system so that it is clea