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Whenever I switch my old Dell E520 on first thing in the morning it fails to boot into Ubuntu 16.04. It gets through bios to grub & beyond but will stop while trying to load the os. It finishes at a black screen. This seems a common problem & I've tried all the suggested solutions appropriate to my setup from the My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it? thread, but none have worked for me.

What seems different from any other solution or discussion offered is that I have found a strange workaround: if I get to grub & run memtest for a minute then press esc to reboot, all is well! This works every time.

My questions are: Can anyone suggest why this works? Is there a solution that does not need my intervention at grub?

Community
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zhdeef
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2 Answers2

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Add nomodeset to your grub commandline.

Edit your /etc/default/grub file.

Look for this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Append nomodeset to the line so it looks like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

Now update your grub with:

$ sudo update-grub

Then reboot.

L. D. James
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This is a thermal problem, but it's reversed from the usual heat issues. One of the connections in your system RAM slots is only making contact when the system has warmed up a bit -- as it'll do after one or more boot failures, or after running memtest for a short time. Try removing and reseating your RAM modules, and you'll probably find the wiping action of the contacts brings back reliable connection and resolves the problem.

Zeiss Ikon
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