Fixing a blank screen in Ubuntu 9

After installing Ubuntu 9 on an old laptop, I found that the computer would boot to a blank screen sometimes, because the video adapter or monitor couldn't handle the resolution being attempted. There are two methods I've tried to fix this.

1. when you start the computer, and see "GRUB loading" -- press ESC to get to the GRUB menu
2. choose recovery mode
3. arrow down to the xfix option: "Try to auto repair graphics problems"
4. resume normal boot

This has worked for me once, but for some reason, upon reboot (to write this entry so I could check the exact wording), the problem persists, and even doing this again won't help. So next I tried this:

1. when you start the computer, and see "GRUB loading" -- press ESC to get to the GRUB menu
2. choose recovery mode
3. choose "drop to root shell prompt"
4. at the prompt, type:
   dpkg --configure -a
5. then:
   dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
6. then you'll get a screen of blah-blah :-), and you should use the arrow keys to choose "Yes" where asked to use the "kernel framebuffer device interface"
7. click no for the keyboard layout question
8. hit the Tab key to choose highlight "OK" for the next question, and same for the rest of the questions
9. when you get back to the prompt, type EXIT
10. choose to "Resume normal boot"

Hopefully at this point all should be well... but you've reduced the video capabilities somewhat by not allowing direct communication with the video hardware. So you should look into figuring out what the exact capabilities of your hardware are, and changing your Ubuntu parameters to meet those limits. I have no idea,yet, how to do this.

Also, if your video system is not a separate card, but just a motherboard resource, be sure that you've told your computer's BIOS to devote as much RAM as possible to video (on my laptop, the choice was either 1 MB or 12 MB).