Walrus4786 was able to solve the issue with this tutorial as shown below.
After upgrading a computer from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 18.04 or Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 20.04, during boot the screen goes blank (turns black), all hard disk activity halts, and the system becomes frozen. This event can also occur on a fresh installation or when updates are installed.
This is due to a video mode issue that causes the system to halt or freeze.
Temporary fix
To get the system to boot:
After turning on your PC, hold the right Shift key to get to the GRUB bootloader if your computer uses a BIOS. If your computer uses EFI or UEFI, continuously tap the Esc key after turning on your PC.
Once GRUB is open, press the “e” key to edit the first highlighted entry “Ubuntu”.
Move your cursor down to the line that starts with linux
, and use the right arrow key to find the section with the words ro quiet splash
.
Add nomodeset
after these words.
Feel free to remove quiet
and splash
for more verbosity to troubleshoot the boot process.
Press either Ctrl + X or F10 to boot.
The system should now boot.
Permanent fix
To permanently resolve the issue:
Once the system has booted using the temporary fix, log in.
Open a terminal window (Dash -> Terminal, or press Ctrl + Alt + T).
Either su
in to root, or use sudo
to open your favorite text editor and edit the file /etc/default/grub
(I use nano which can be installed by running sudo apt install nano
):
nano /etc/default/grub
Locate the line with the variable GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
, and add nomodeset
to the variables. Feel free to remove splash
and quiet
if you'd like text boot. Here's an example of my line after editing (yours will look different):
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"
Save the file and exit the text editor (Ctrl+X to quit, then press y
and Enter to save).
At the bash prompt, execute the following command to regenerate the grub.conf file on the /boot
partition from your new default file:
update-grub
Restart your system. It should now boot!