Ubuntu 20.04 boots to black screen with flashing cursor
This is a recent installation which appeared to be working just fine. While sorting out some teething troubles with ESP-IDF I got a warning about some update failure - no details - and then nothing seemed to work. I'm guessing automatic updates in the background. Pretty sure I wasn't doing anything controversial. Upon rebooting I briefly see a message that "sda4 is clean" and then a flashing cursor forever. I have tried CTRL+SHIFT+F1 but this does nothing.
Is there any way to recover this? I have an nvidia graphics card, as that seems to come up in similar questions. I guess I can boot from the DVD again, but hopefully can avoid re-installation.
I also encountered the black screen with my new installation, and it was a relatively easy fix. Press CTRL-ALT-F3 to trigger the CLI, and, once logged in, type:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Find the line with the variable GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, and add nomodeset to the variables, so it looks like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"
Then update-grub:
sudo update-grub
And it should boot. I also ran apt-get update -y && apt-get upgrade -y once in just to make sure everything is good to go. Best of luck!
I experienced a similar issue after a system update that required a reboot. However, I couldn't open a text console with any CTRL-ALT-F# key combinations.
Ultimately what fixed it for me were the following steps:
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Booted into recovery mode and ran the "dpkg Repair broken packages" option.
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Then ran the "root Drop to root shell prompt" option and from the command line uninstalled and reinstalled my AMD Radeon graphics card drivers.
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Rebooted and pressed the 'e' key to edit the "*Ubuntu" boot option in GRUB and added "noresume" at the end of the line that starts with "linux", then pressed Ctrl-X to boot from the modified line.
Hope this helps someone...
On Ubuntu 20.04 I fixed this by doing:
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Ctrl+Alt+F3
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Log in.
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall -
Reboot.