Celeb Glow
general | March 07, 2026

CentOS boots to login prompt but shows black screen after authentication

I run CentOS 6.4 inside VirtualBox on a Windows PC for work. Recently, my machine crashed while the VM was still running and had to be power-cycled. Upon reboot, everything in Windows was fine, but my CentOS vm is pretty well hosed up. It boots to the login prompt (GUI), and I can enter my username and password. It accepts them, but then shows nothing but a black screen. I can see the cursor and it is responsive, but I cannot run any programs or right-click to open any context menus. I also get a popup in the lower right-hand corner of the screen that reads as follows:

Install problem!

The configuration defaults for GNOME Power Manager have not been installed correctly. Please contact your computer administrator

I'm pretty new to Linux, and while I know how to boot to a command terminal instead, I'm at a loss as to what to try to fix this. Has anyone else seen this, what did you end up doing to fix it?

2 Reset to default

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