Ubuntu 20.04 suddenly can't boot, boots into black screen with blinking underscore cursor

I've been using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for a while now. It's been great, but suddenly, today, it can't boot. Whenever I turn on my laptop, it boots into GRUB, I select "Ubuntu", it shows the boot screen, and then ultimately boots into a black screen with a single blinking underscore cursor in the top left.

All the ttys work fine. I can access tty2-tty6 just fine and log in. However, I just cannot get into the graphical login screen.

I've tried nomodeset, but no luck. I've tried running Boot Repair three times, but it still cannot fix it.

Here's the pastebin log of my latest run of Boot Repair: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/DMr56dqFsY/

Ubuntu was working fine yesterday, and has been working fine ever since I updated - but it suddenly does this now. I searched on the internet quite a bit and it seems most people only get this problem right after an update. I could not find any discussions or posts about it suddenly happening when it was working fine the day before.

Does anyone know what's going on and how I can fix it?

Solution 1:

This is what works for me most of the time.

Ctrl+Alt+F2

This should bring the command line log in. I don't bother logging in I go ahead and press

Ctrl+Alt+F1

This then shows the window manager.

Mind you this will not fix a messed up grub.