18.04 upgraded to 19.04 boot hangs Merge Posts
OK. So I have spent a good amount of time looking at forums, searching for my "exact issue" and I still struggle find something. I typically do not post questions as there is a lot of help. Last 2 times I used "help" from a forum, it either made it worse or just outright did not work. Sorry this is a long read, but been dealing with it for some time now.
I have been running Linux as a secondary OS for quite some time. It is not “dual boot” as I have it as a separate install without access to modify the bootloader on my primary Windows 10 drive, so I have to select the drive to boot from if I want it to load. Here is a basic breakdown of hardware I run. (I HAVE NO ISSUES WITH ANY OF IT IN WINDOWS 10):
Motherboard - ASUS TUF LGA1151
Processor - Core I7-6700K 4.00 GHz 8M Processor Cache 4 LGA 1151 BX80662I76700K
Memory - Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4 x 8GB)
Video - 2 x EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 SC GAMING ACX 3.0
Hard Drives - 2 x 1TB Data Drives
2 x 512 Corsair SSD main system drives
Various External USB Drives
Monitor 1 - Dell 30" DP2 Monitor
Monitor 2 - Samsung 1080P HDMI monitor
So I was running PoP OS LTS 18.04. No issues whatsoever. Games worked fine, such as Minecraft with raytracing, Steam games worked, Lutris with BL 3 worked. Then PoP-os said it had an update to 19.04. Ran the update, and after logging in, intermittently the video would just lose sync. If I forced logged out, it would come back. Sometimes I could unplug HDMI and it would come back. I could not get it to stop, and it seemed that it knew I had NVIDIA cards, but certain parts of the system said it did not detect it. Weird.
Tried a fresh install of 19.04. Same. 19.10. Same. 18.04 again. Same. All POP-os.
So, because I am curious, I tried some other Ubuntu distro derivatives, and they had similar issues. Went to Ubuntu 18.04. Works fine. No issues whatsoever. Full graphic support. All my CUDA works fine in my programs. Solid OS. Last evening, it finally notified me to upgrade to 19.04. I know I was looking for failure, but I figured, why not. Now after the upgrade, it hangs at boot after Starting the Gnome Display Manager. It is not frozen. Just sits there, indefinitely. I found an article that claims they have a fix, but I haven’t tried it.
Has anyone out there experiences similar? I mean, this is why Linux is not mainstream. Anyone with a good solid working OS that sees an upgrade come out with improvements is going to do it. And then the OS just craps itself. Fine, blame Nvidia if you want. But it was working perfect. Upgrade broke it. Hopefully someone out there has experiences this exact issue and takes some time to explain why it happens and how to fix it. This is super frustrating.
OK so I am going to document each thing I researched and tried. On each, some had success with just these things. I will post what worked for me.
So when you first turn on computer, and you are presented with GRUB menu, press the "E" key on the line you wish to load. This will bring up a code editor for a 1-time change for this boot. Scroll down to the line that starts with "Linux" and type nomodeset and then press F10. This command is stated to not load the display manager before the video card driver, which can cause a hang on some systems. If this works, once in go edit your GRUB config file with SUDO and add nomodeset back to the line and save it. This should now fix your issue permanently if this actually works for you. This did not fix my problem. I would venture a guess if your system updates and your kernal changes and all of a sudden your boot hangs again, you can use same fix.
If the above didn't work, try this. This is likely most applicable for fresh installs, or fresh upgrades.
From the GRUB boot load screen, select "Recovery Mode" from the line of whichever distro and kernel version you are trying to load. Once loaded, select option to fix broken packages. Once this is done, select to boot to command line.
From command line, type:sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa This will add the driver repo for Linux to check for driver updates. Now, type: sudo apt update Once this is done, type sudo apt upgrade This should now download and install any upgrades to packages and drivers and build the driver package for whatever kernel is currently running on your distro. Once done, type sudo reboot to restart your machine. This fix has reportedly worked for some with no further actions needed. This did not fix my issue, however.
After having tried both the above posted fixes, i did a little research on the Gnome Display Manager, as Ubuntu uses GDM3 now in 19.04? I believe this is correct. Anyhow, during some of my hang ups The screen would flash over to show that the last thing trying to load was the Gnome Display Manager. So as above, i loaded into the root terminal from the Recovery Mode in the GRUB loader, and I installed lightdm which is the old Ubuntu display manager, just to see if this would work. You can Google how to do this, and it was very easy. Once installed, I did the SUDO reboot, loaded recovery for the kernel (which by the way updated from previous fix try), selected to fix any broken packages, and then selected option to resume loading. Loading from here worked as it just shoed a little flashing cursor on the top left of the screen, and i then used the keys "control" "alt" and F1 to login from terminal without the display manager. From here, i ran the command sudo dpkg-reconfigre lightdm and then sudo service lightdm restart to start the lightdm service and boom, Linux loaded the login screen and allowed me to login and use Linux under the old display manager. I modified Linux to load this display manager as default and I am able to run all my stuff again, and all seems to be running fine.
Here is what is still baffling me. Why, on a fresh install or upgrade, is GDM3 not working properly? It is consistent on my machine that it doesn't work correctly after both fresh installs and upgrades. I am by no means a coder, but from all the articles and help forums I have read, it seems that between the Video Driver, Kernel, and the GDM3, there is a conflict causing GDM3 to freeze. I plan to modify things again to see if it will now load GDM3 by default, as now that I have a login screen, it allows me to select the default display manager to load with Linux, but it is using the lightdm login to select it. By all accounts, this is just fine for my purposes the way it is, but it is a problem nonetheless. The Ubuntu people read into this and figure this out. There are plenty of people suffering from upgrading their system and seemingly "bricking" them unless you invest a lot of time and effort to learn how to fix it. This issue doesn't help sell Linux as a viable replacement to Windows or MacOS if upgrading to the latest edition causes your computer to brick. And for people that do not understand Linux at all and just want something that works will not know how to do what I just posted here, even with reading it.
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