Installing Ubuntu ends in a black screen in MSI GE60

When I choose install Ubuntu I see black screen of nothingness. And I have disabled secure boot and fast boot in UEFI. Any other option also ends with black screen.

It's possible that MSI's UEFI implementation is preventing me from installing Ubuntu.

I have a GeForce GTX 765M GPU. Maybe this will help you.

The only Linux distribution I can install without getting a black screen is Arch Linux, but it is hard for me to install it, and also, I need to later transform Arch to Ubuntu if there is no other way of getting Ubuntu installed on my laptop.

The power consumption of the GeForce GTX 765M GPU in your MSI GE60 gaming laptop should be between 50 and 75 Watts! That's a lot of power and it could definitely make USB boot go to hell. The GPU has 3GB of built-in RAM. That could cause booting problems as well. Your GPU could be sucking power from the USB flash drive. If the USB port is not getting enough power, then almost any live distro that you try to run from the USB will freeze.

And what's strange about it is that if the distro is really lightweight it WON'T freeze. GParted live USB won't freeze. Clonezilla live USB won't freeze. SOMETIMES Xubuntu live USB won't freeze (and sometimes it will freeze anyway) and also Lubuntu live USB. Well, I said "SOMETIMES", although Lubuntu live USB black screens on your laptop too.

I read your post about getting Arch to boot on your laptop, and based on this I made a special Ubuntu 13.10 minimal install CD and got it to boot successfully on a machine that couldn't boot from a normal Ubuntu live USB. Then I booted from the Ubuntu 13.10 mini CD and tested it in Rescue Mode without installing Ubuntu. Then I exited from Rescue Mode by aborting the Rescue Mode startup at the language selection window and clicked to shutdown the computer normally. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Downloaded the Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit Mini CD iso file from the link on the Ubuntu Documentation Installation Minimal CD webpage. Download the Ubuntu Mini CD iso file for Ubuntu 20.04 from http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/focal/main/installer-amd64/current/legacy-images/netboot/mini.iso. You should select the Ubuntu 13.10 iso file, not the 13.04 iso, so that you can upgrade your operating system to the next Long Term Support version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 14.04, when it is released in April 2014. I downloaded the file called mini.iso to my Downloads folder.

2. Verified the md5 checksum of the Ubuntu mini CD iso file that I downloaded by running these commands:

    cd ~/Downloads/
    md5sum 'mini.iso'
   

   Then I checked that the results of the command matched the MD5 checksum of the mini.iso file on the Ubuntu Documentation Installation Minimal CD webpage.

3. Got a USB flash drive, 1GB or larger. Deleted all the files from the USB flash drive. I unmounted the flash drive using the Disks disk utility. The package name of the Disks disk utility is gnome-disk-utility

4. Checked in Disks disk utility to find out the device name of my USB flash drive. This is very important because if you use the wrong device name in step 5, you will overwrite your whole operating system instead of writing to the USB flash drive. So check the USB flash drive device name twice. It should be something like /dev/sd* where instead of the * character there is a lower case letter. The device name of my flash drive was /dev/sdc.

5. Opened the terminal and ran the following commands:

    cd ~/Downloads/  
    sudo su  
    dd if='mini.iso' of=/dev/sdc bs=4096  
   

   These are the commands I used to write the Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit mini.iso file to my USB flash drive. The dd if='mini.iso' of=/dev/sdc bs=4096 command took less than 9 seconds to complete on my computer because the mini.iso is a small file, only 36MB. The result of running this command was a bootable Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit mini CD. I checked the USB flash drive in GParted to check if it was bootable. GParted did not recognize the boot flag on my flash drive, but the USB flash drive was indeed bootable as I found out in the following step.

6. Booted the computer from the Ubuntu 13.10 mini live USB. The Ubuntu 13.10 mini live USB booted successfully and showed a menu screen.

7. From the menu screen pressed the F1 key to bring up the Help menu.

8. From the Help menu I selected the option for Rescue Mode, because I wanted to test the Ubuntu 13.10 mini live USB without installing anything.

9. The Rescue Mode started successfully. I clicked on the Back button at the first screen and then on the Yes button when it asked me if I wanted to abort and then I clicked to shutdown the computer normally.

Now I have a working bootable Ubuntu 13.10 mini live USB. Since your laptop can boot the Arch minimal CD, it is very likely that it can also boot the Ubuntu 13.10 mini live USB. Select the Install option (not the command-line install, the complete install) from the menu screen in Step 6. The Ubuntu installer will start installing Ubuntu, and it will prompt you when you need to make a selection or type information about your Ubuntu installation. When you restart the system at the end of the installation, you will have a working Ubuntu desktop with the default desktop environment.