The problem I am facing
I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 24.04 on an external SSD and want to boot it on my Windows PC. The problem I am facing is that in normal boot, it always arrives at a white screen with the error message:
Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. Please contact a system administrator.
What I tried
Reinstalling gdm3
Unfortunately, I am my own system administrator. I found that the system boots normally in recovery mode. After viewing several posts on similar issues, I deduced it is a problem with gdm3.
Hence, I uninstalled and reinstalled gdm3. It resolves the problem, but only for one time. If I reboot, the white screen resumes. This is what I did:
First I boot through recovery mode. Then in the terminal:
sudo apt purge gdm3
sudo reboot
After reboot, in the CLI I do:
sudo apt install gdm3
sudo service gdm start
This takes me to the login screen, but if I reboot, the white screen error comes back. This time sudo service gdm start does not start the login screen. If I use systemctl status gdm, it shows gdm is running normally.
Switching to lightdm
I have also tried to switch to lightdm, it leads to a different white screen error that says:
Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. Please log out and try again.
Of course, the log out button does nothing.
Reinstalling Nvidia driver
If I enter the terminal at the white screen by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F3, sometimes these error messages show up.
So the problem could be with the Nvidia drivers. My GPU is a Nvidia 1660 Ti. I let the Ubuntu installer handled installing the drivers during system installation. I tried to remove those drivers with
sudo apt purge nvidia-*
sudo apt --purge remove '*nvidia*535*'
sudo apt autoremove
Then reinstall following the official guide with
sudo ubuntu-drivers install
It did not resolve the problem. I have tried other methods for installing Nvidia drivers like in this post with
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535 nvidia-dkms-535
Of course I tried this method after removing the drivers installed via the first method. I have also tried to use the Additional Drivers app to install the driver, but I do not think reinstalling the driver made a difference. The white screen shows up anyway.
Reinstalling gnome desktop
I also tried to install gnome desktop following this post.
sudo apt install ubuntu-gnome-desktop
sudo apt install gnome-shell gnome
Did not resolve the issue.
What I want to know
To summarize, the white screen does not provide any reason as to why the error happens, which is very absurd. The only solution, although one-time, is to reinstall gdm3. There are error messages associated with the Nvidia driver, but reinstalling the driver does not fix the problem.
I want to ask how I can identify the source of the problem and resolve it. Is this clear enough, community bot?
Investigations
Uninstall Nvidia drivers and don't install them
Uninstalled the drivers using
sudo apt purge nvidia-*
sudo apt --purge remove '*nvidia*535*'
sudo apt autoremove
Only remaining packages after searching with dpkg -l | grep 'nvidia' are firmware-nvidia-graphics and linux-signatures-nvidia-6.8.0-40-generic.
Rebooted and still encountered the white screen.
Boot from a usb drive
I should also add, when I etched the mirror image onto the usb drive and booted it to install Ubuntu, choosing Try or Install Ubuntu led to the same white screen. Only Ubuntu (Safe Graphics) boots successfully and let me install Ubuntu on my SSD.
However, the same usb stick with Ubuntu 22.04 etched can boot into Ubuntu normally without needing to use safe graphics. Maybe I should just install 22.04 instead?
