Blank screen, blinking cursor on boot

Solution 1:

Hold shift during boot, then hit E to edit the GRUB entry. Remove the part that says quiet splash and replace it with text to see what's happening during boot.

Solution 2:

I encountered this issue and it turned out the problem was my hard drive being 100% full. Steps I took to troubleshoot and finally fix this were as follows:

Boot to blinking cursor
Press Ctrl+Alt+Fx to enter Ubuntu's tty virtual console screen, where x is anything between 2 and 6. In my case I did Ctrl+Alt+F2
Log in using your username and password.
Type in df to check the storage and if indeed there is no more free space
If storage is the issue, clear some space by deleting unnecessary files.
To ensure kernel/grub settings are also not an issue, edit them settings by going to the grub settings file:
```
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
```
Edit the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in the grub settings file to say
```
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset noresume"
```
Update grub settings sudo update-grub
Reboot by typing in reboot
Boot to blinking cursor and wait, it should now bring you to the login page! :)

Solution 3:

In my case, the blinking cursor was all I would ever get. No boot. It was upon installing a fresh Ubuntu Minimal. I figured out that during the GRUB installation step, it was installing GRUB onto the wrong drive, the "first" drive (/dev/sda).

My system has 3 drives. Two 500GB drives in RAID, that I didn't want to touch during installation, and a 120GB SSD that I use for the OS. For whatever reason, the "first drive" (/dev/sda) is one of my 500GB drives. /dev/sdb is my 120GB drive and /dev/sdc is the other 500GB drive.

So, when formatting with a partition table of "mbr" on my 120GB drive, I did the normal 117GB of bootable ext4 and 3GB of swap. On the GRUB installation step, DO NOT choose Yes to put GRUB onto the "first" drive. Choose NO. This will bring up another screen that allows you to input /dev/sdX. In my case, I tried /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1, but the installer would give me a fatal error every time, which still makes no sense.

Finally, I had to format my 120GB drive with a partition table of "gpt". With GPT, you have to manually create a GRUB partition. That's the way things are done with GPT. So, the first partition I made for GRUB was 32.0 MB formatted for "boot or something (forget wording)". Second partition was my 3.0 GB formatted for "swap", at the "end". Third partition was the remaining space formatted as "ext4".

Now, when choosing NO during the GRUB installation step, manually input /dev/sdb, not /dev/sdb1 surprisingly, and it then works. GRUB installs into the 32MB boot partition on the correct drive and the system boots normally. YAY!

BTW, you have to choose Expert install from the menu at the beginning of the installation to do all this and format your HDD "manually" not "guided". Guided will always choose /dev/sda as the first drive and blinking cursor/no boot will result if /dev/sda isn't your OS drive.

Solution 4:

I have had this problem in the past, and found that it appears to happen on some kernels and not others although I have not had this issue since upgrading to Meerkat. But often times I found I would have to select a prior Kernel to load into Ubuntu properly.

Solution 5:

Verify your disk drive is seated correctly (especially if you are fooling around with your hardware). We just solved this problem because my admin came into my lab and popped out the disk drives and popped them back in and everything booted up nicely! I was swapping the drives between machines and being way too delicate when re-seating them, so they weren't fully connected to the machine, hence no Operating System to load.