16.04 will not boot

[wrecked2]

This Asus N56-vj dual boot 16.04/10 laptop had been used offline since february, but today I used my phone as a hotspot and ran an update. I got an error popup saying there was an issue with the nvidia driver. I attempted a restart but it would not proceed to grub. I plugged in my 16.04 live usb and restarted again with the same result: just a black screen and zero activity. I am unable to even get into bios. The live usb is completely inactive.

I've tried everything I know, which is admittedly little, but I've never seen this sort of failure. I'm stumped. Not being able to load a live usb seems pretty bad... Can anybody lend a hand?

Cheers

[wrecked2]

I've tried many of the key press combinations listed in the sticky "Graphics update/ black screen" above, but the system appears unresponsive to any inputs at start up. Again there is a brief flash of hdd activity immediately after power up, then nothing at all.

I don't have an actual live compact disk -- just two USB's-- one with a 16.04 iso, and another with an 18.04 iso, but the optical drive is also showing zero signs of life so I doubt it makes any difference. Im more than a little familiar with the sounds of this machine waking up, but at present it makes no sounds at all during boot.

[cruzer001]

Hi wrecked2, welcome to the forums.

I am unable to even get into bios
That of course is before any operating system boots up, which makes it sound like a hardware failure.

[oldfred]

If UEFI system, you may have fast boot on in UEFI. Then UEFI does not do any system scan & immediately boots. And you do not have time to press any keys to get into UEFI or UEFI boot menu.

You can try "cold" boot, not "warm" reboot.
Totally shutdown system, remove battery if laptop, and hold power switch for 10 seconds or so to drain any left over power. Then boot & immediately press correct key to get into UEFI.

[wrecked2]

Thanks for the responses. Im also leaning towards hardware failure myself and the timing of the upgrade is purely coincidental. It's the nature of this universe that it likes to mess with your head like this. Although just what I ever did to torque it off so much I'll never know...

I'll try the extremely cold boot thing momentarily.

[wrecked2]

No luck on the frozen boot front. Using a stethoscope I can discern that the hdd is actually spinning up, but it doesn't sound like it used to. Blast. Oh well, time to spend some money I guess.

To be sure of the failure I'm going to leave it with a local fella what seen a book once and knows a thing or two about computers. Maybe all it needs is a new hdd? Im out of my depth now.

Again many thanks for the tips folks.