Just a short post to that you all for you help. A really big thanks to Bruce who spent a number of hours trying to solve my problem. It is great to have so many people happy to help a novice like me. I was unable to solve my upgrade problem in the end and I reloaded Dapper. I did come across the following which may have solved my problem - it may be helpful to someone. /*no text status messages in ubuntu edgy 6.10 splash screen* After upgrading from ubuntu 6.06 to ubuntu 6.10, usplash stopped working, Ubuntu started displaying a blank screen during startup and shutdown. *Solution* Edgy disabled the status messages in Usplash, but you can get them back easily using the following commands. First, open your menu.lst gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst Now you remove any mention of “quiet” from the file. You should get the messages again next time you boot./ /November 2nd, 2006 at 8:30 am <http://www.debianadmin.com/ubuntu-edgy-upgrade-common-problems-with-solutions.html#comment-565> In “text and splash doesn’t after upgrade to edgy” section, sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst should be a tiny typo of gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst/ Dapper is working for me and so I will probably just stick with it for the moment Cheers John