Mint-9 does not start

[Ciril]

My OS Mint-9 (Isadora) does not start any more. This morning it was ok and then a message came-up saying "Firefox has crashed" and nothing was working after that. I tried to restart system but all I got is - black screen with Mint logo on it and 5-white dots that normally would change colors, but this time this dots were just sitting there doing nothing, also on my Logitech keyboard 2 lights begun to flash on the upper right side - that normally never flashed before this problem, one of the lights is Caps Lock and the other is Scroll Lock, they flash in unison and at steady rate. Tried few shut-down's and few re-start's but to no avail.

Mint-9 shares HD with Ubuntu-10.04. They share 320 GB drive 50/50. Ubuntu-10.04 works fine but Mint-9 for some reason developed some sort of problem. At start-up Ubuntu-10.04 is the first to start unless I scroll down and select Mint-9.

I don't know much about computers and will need detailed guidance as to what to do to fix this problem. Don't know any shop that works with this type of OS in San Francisco, California.

Please help.
Ciril.

[passerby]

Have you tried entering recovery mode through the option in grub? If nothing else it'll probably give you a reason why it can't start, or perhaps hang on a specific process.

[Ciril]

Have you tried entering recovery mode through the option in grub? If nothing else it'll probably give you a reason why it can't start, or perhaps hang on a specific process.

The best I could do is take photo of recovery mode screen and attach-it to this reply. It is a .jpg format.
Ciril.

[passerby]

Ooh, I see a kernel panic. You can get some quick answers to that here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/35722/wh ... rnel-panic
Basically it's the linux equivalent of the Windows BSOD.

There are ways around the issue, but given how out of date your OS is I really recommend doing a fresh install of Mint 13 or 14.