Linux Black Screen On Boot

Being a Linux lover comes with some responsibilities. One of these responsibilities is to catch and resolve bugs. In this post, I will describe catching errors in the boot phase and the solution in my own case.

I had a problem in past days. I use Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS on notebook with Nvidia GTX 1650TI. The problem started when I upgrade and install some apt packages. The solution method I will explain is not only related to these packages. You can follow this path for every problem you will have during the boot phase.

First, my notebook stucked at booting with blank screen. I tried to switch tty sessions via cmd+alt+f1 to f9. Screen was like that:

When ever I tried to power on, It stucked like above. Then I forward with couple trics.

1-) Recovery Mode

You can get recovery mode by restarting the machine and pressing the “Esc” key repeatedly. The Grub boot-loader menu has multiple choices and can be selected according to need. Follow the guide carefully to get the “recovery mode” menu list. There are several options, i.e., clean, dbkg, fsck, network, grub, and root. So I selected drop command prompt as root.

2-) Network Configurations

To be honest, after first step I tried use journalctl command which I explain at 3rd step. But I couldn’t use because Network services was not active.

root@[ubuntu]#: systemctl status NetworkManager #The service name may be different.

Then I restared the service.

root@[ubuntu]#: systemctl restart NetworkManager #The service name may be different.

3-) Jornalctl System Logs

journalctl may be used to query the contents of the systemd(1) journal as written by systemd-journald.service. If called without parameters, it will show the full contents of the journal, starting with the oldest entry collected. It logs system activity.

root@[ubuntu]#: journalctl - since today # or journalctl -e

Gothca! I could see the broken line. In my case nvidia drivers doesn’t work healty. And I found system error logs belong nvidia on journal logs.

4-) Remove Broken Packages

root@[ubuntu]#: sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'

I wanted to share as this error is popping up again in nvidia 500+ versions of ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS version. I hope that will be useful. See you next time.