[EDIT: as there weren't any responses I eventually reinstalled and all is working now, so don't spend any time on this...]
I’m struggling with getting my Ubuntu 20.04.3 machine (Ubuntu only, not dual boot) to boot normally. It has been fine for ages but has suddenly stopped working. Recovery mode is OK but with a normal boot I get a spinner icon and “Ubuntu” with the circle symbol at the bottom of the screen. After that I usually get the lines from a clean fsck of the root partition (in fact the only partition) /dev/sda1 and then:
Starting Hostname Service…
[OK] Finished Hold until boot process finishes up.
[OK] Finished Terminate Plymouth Boot Screen.
When I get this, the font is small and “[OK]” is green, but sometimes I only get the fsck output in a bigger “dumb terminal” font.
And then it just sits there indefinitely. So I’m guessing there’s some step in the boot process that is hanging but not telling me.
So I go into Grub2 and, following advice I found after some searching, edit the config for a default “Ubuntu” boot, to try and get it to give more diagnostics as it’s booting. On the “linux” line I remove “quiet splash”. Now when I boot, it just hangs, without even the diagnostic lines I showed above. So I try again, removing “quiet splash” but this time also changing “gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode” to “gfxmode text”. Now the boot shows me loads of diagnostics, but they all look fine (all green “[OK]”) and I get a login prompt - but it’s just a dumb screen, not Gnome. So I’m no further forward except presumably to infer that the problem is graphics-related. The only possible problem I noticed was a line “Grub failed boot detection” but that was repeated a couple of lines later with “[OK]” before it.
Looking at /var/log/syslog, there is nothing suspicious-looking just before the boot hangs. The last line printed is “NetworkManager-dispatcher.service: Succeeded”.There are only a dozen or so lines from after I made the Grub edit and continued the boot, and they all look innocent (most of them are NetworkManager ones).
I also tried all the changes to the 'linux' line suggested at
https://itsfoss.com/fix-ubuntu-freezing/, but none of them helped.
Suggestions for what might be hanging would be very welcome, but I’d also like to know how I can get it to do a verbose boot with graphics mode equal to $linux_gfx_mode. Then maybe I can tell what is hanging.
Possible things that might have triggered this, included for completeness:
(1) The problem first appeared at my first halt-and-reboot after the clocks changed - but it is showing the correct time now.
(2) It was also my first halt-and-reboot after upgrading RAM from 8GB to 16GB, though rebooting after upgrading the RAM was fine. Initially I was seeing “Gave up waiting for suspend/resume device” before the fsck output, and I assumed that was the problem. I spent a while messing about with /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and update-initramfs -u, but the message persisted. Eventually I created a new swapfile (which I wanted anyway for the new RAM), used its UUID in conf.d/resume, and switched /etc/fstab to point to it, and then the “Gave up waiting” message went away, so I don’t think this is what’s causing the problem, but who knows.
Thank you! I have everything backed up and could just do a reinstall, but I’d much rather not lose all my packages and configurations.
David
