I have a Compaq Presario r3000 laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit. 1.2GB RAM, with a nvidia Gforce 420 Go with 32MB RAM.

It hangs on bootup about 3 out of 4 times at either the purple screen, or with a cursor in the upper left corner. Booting without a splash screen shows it hanging after attempting to initialize the floppy controller.

Unity has never booted to 3D either, only 2D, with the additional drivers always failing to install.

I searched all over this board and found similar issues, and tried everything there. Extensive vid driver install and uninstalls. Network issues that I've since resolved. I even found a very similar topic with a fix that didn't work.

I'll probably try a clean install today (given how much I've probably messed up), and I would really appreciate any ideas. I'm fairly new to Ubuntu, so if you would like to see any error logs or configs, please walk me through exactly how to get and post them here.

Thanks.