Ubuntu 20.04 not booting. How to recover it?

Question

My ubuntu 20.04 was working fine until today when I approved 971 MB update. It demanded restart which i did and then after selecting 'ubuntu' on grub menu, the manufacturer logo(MSI) is stuck. No signs of ubuntu booting. I have a lot of Softwares installed for work purposes. I don't want to do a fresh reinstall. Please suggest how I could recover ubuntu

I have nvidia rtx 2080 ti and I was using 460 nvidia driver

TIA

Answer 1

1. Immediately after the motherboard / computer manufacturer logo splash screen appears when the computer is booting, with BIOS, quickly press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up the GNU GRUB menu. (If you see the Ubuntu logo, you've missed the point where you can enter the GRUB menu.) With UEFI press (perhaps several times) the Esc key to get to the GRUB menu. Sometimes the manufacturer's splash screen is a part of the Windows bootloader, so when you power up the machine it goes straight to the GRUB screen, and then pressing Shift is unnecessary.

   The timing when to press the left Shift key can be tricky, so sometimes if you miss it you need to try it again. If that doesn't work try the answers to I can't get the GRUB menu to show up during boot.

2. From the first purple GNU GRUB screen select Advanced options for Ubuntu with the ↑ and ↓ keys and press Enter. You will then be prompted by a menu that looks something like this:

   

3. Press the down arrow key until you select the second entry from the top (the one with the recovery mode in the description) and then press Enter.

   Now you should see this recovery menu:

   

4. Using the arrow keys scroll down to network (the third entry from the bottom in the Recovery Menu) and then press Enter.

5. Using the arrow keys scroll down to root and then press Enter twice.

   You should now see a root prompt, something like this:

    root@ubuntu:~#
   

6. At this stage you should have a read-only filesystem. You have to remount it with write permissions:

    mount -o rw,remount /
   

7. Uninstall the proprietary Nvidia graphics driver.

   apt update
   apt remove '^nvidia'
   apt autoremove  
   reboot   
   

After rebooting Ubuntu 20.04 will be using the built-in open source nouveau graphics driver.

Answer 2

You can try booting an earlier version of the kernel. Try the following:

Start the computer and on the Grub menu select Advanced options > Select an earlier kernel version.

Also, you could try to update your MSI BIOS.

Answer 3

Here i found the similar issue that my Linux OS was not booting instead a black screen with blinking underscore was visible.

So I tried the above solution and it worked.

The steps I followed.

Using the arrow keys scroll down to root and then press Enter twice.

You should now see a root prompt, something like this:

root@ubuntu:~#

At this stage you should have a read-only filesystem. You have to remount it with write permissions:

mount -o rw,remount /

Uninstall the proprietary Nvidia graphics driver.

sudo apt update
sudo apt remove '^nvidia'
sudo apt autoremove  
sudo reboot 

Answer 4

I had a similar issue where my Ubuntu system startup got stuck at the manufacturer's logo. In my case it was because I had an almost FULL DISK. To fix this:

1. Boot from an Ubuntu Live USB but DO NOT reinstall the system, choose: "Try Ubuntu".
2. Insert another USB memory with enough empty space to cut and paste some big files there, like movies, to free up some space. (In my case 10 GB was enough).
3. Turn off you computer, disconnect the USBs and start-up Ubuntu again normally.
4. Manage your files so you can have enough empty space to continue using Ubuntu without problems.

I'm giving this answer since no answer have been marked as Accepted and the issue seems similar to the one I had.