Only able to boot in recovery mode

[bmarci]

Hi,

I'm using ubuntu 14.04 and when I want to boot the system it stucks at the loading screen. When I enter recovery mode and select resume it works as charm. It might be a little messy with the UUIDs but I don't know the exact source of the problem. Do you have any advice how to fix the normal booting?

[deadflowr]

first, I would try refreshing the grub bootloader with

sudo update-grub

Then if that is not helpful, perhaps I would boot into a previous version from the boot menu.

In the boot menu, below the option to boot into recovery mode, should be an option to boot into previous versions. This will allow you to boot into older kernels.
(It means previous kernel versions, which you should have a few unless you are super vigilant at cleaning them up)

See if either of them are helpful.

If not, we can dig deeper, but we'll hold off on that for the moment...

[grahammechanical]

If you can load to a desktop using Recovery mode>Resume then there is nothing wrong with the Grub boot menu. Recovery mode runs on Linux. If Grub was looking in the wrong place for the LInux boot image then you would get a Grub rescue prompt.

I suggest that once you get to a desktop using Resume you open System Settings and go to Software and Updates and open the Additional Drivers tab and change video drivers.

The Resume option loads to a desktop using an open source video driver called llvmpipe. So, it seems to me that this problem is caused by a proprietary video driver.

Regards.

[bmarci]

Thanks for the quick answers. I tried everything what is written but unfortunately it hasn't solved yet. Any other ideas?

[sotiris2]

What driver did you choose from the Additional drivers tab? What is your graphics card?

[bmarci]

I used the NVIDIA binary driver 331.38 (proprietary) and tried the open source one: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau. It didn't matter after rebooting I only saw the loading screen with the running spots.

[sotiris2]

Did this system use to work? Did you change anything lately? When it is stuck in the dots loop can you get a terminal via ctrl+alt+f1?

[bmarci]

Yes, this system worked. There was a problem with booting and I've messed with fstab to fix it. Now this error has gone but I'm only be able to boot in recovery mode. After pressing ctrl+alt+f1 I only see "-" in the top left corner.

[sotiris2]

Ok get to grub select which kernel (non recovery you want to boot) and press e you will get some code. Near the end (second to last?) you will find a line finishing in ro quiet splash $vt_handoff. Delete quiet splash so its ro $vt_handoff and press ctrl+x to boot. Instead of showing dots it will show text. When it gets stuck check what are the last lines. Maybe they 'll help us understand exactly what is preventing the system from booting.

[kansasnoob]

There was a problem with booting and I've messed with fstab to fix it.

Can you provide a little more detail? Did you follow some on-line instructions?

Please post the output of these 5 commands using code tags:

df -H

sudo parted -l

sudo blkid -c /dev/null

cat /etc/fstab

cat  /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume