Question: I have an recurring problem. Every once in a while, no pattern, the laptop freezes during boot. Sometimes at a black screen, sometimes a black screen with a not blinking cursor...

The solution is to power down the laptop, cross my fingers and boot again. Sometimes it takes four or five reboots, but in the end I always get the system up and running.

What bugs me is the fact that the boot is not 'stable' in a sense that apparently it doesn't always do exactly the same thing.

I'm still using 10.10. The question is whether there is anything that can be done to make the system stable. (Does 11.04 have the same issue?)

**Edit:** Today the same thing happened. First a black screen with a non blinking cursor. Second a black screen. Third login screen.

Answer: 
You may want to try and look at the logs. It's not very exciting, especially since you often don't know what to look for. The following ones are likely to provide clues:

```
/var/log/dmesg
/var/log/dmesg.0
/var/log/Xorg.0.log

```

If you find system logs too cryptic, post them to <http://www.pastebin.com/> so that other may have a look.
radeon graphic card, i guess? :) install kernel 3.0.0. That's what fixes radeon bug freezing at black/blank screen. Before the kernel upgrade my best record was 15 reboots in a row before it could sign in properly :)

3.0.0 is release candidate, though, so you might (for some unknown reason) not want to use it, downgrade to 2.6.35 then, it didn't have the bug.