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I was running Ubuntu 17.10, and after upgrading the packages, the system stopped booting. Grub displays fine but after pressing enter, I see "_" at the top left of the screen, and shortly after that the screen goes totally black (when I'd expect prompt for my encrypted drive password).

So far I've tried:

  • downgrading grub to version before the upgrade
  • previous kernel
  • upgrading to 18.04
  • testing Ubuntu 18.04 and Mint ISO installers, which also don't boot
  • testing newest Fedora ISO, which boots and works fine (including proper graphics drivers and external monitors)

Adding nomodeset makes it possible to boot, but is less than ideal because then xorg uses generic drivers that are slow, and don't allow me to use external monitors.

I was also able to boot once without nomodeset, and it booted ok, but froze after couple of seconds with red artifacts. I can't reproduce that anymore, there's just the blank screen.

With no splash screen, the last message I see is:

[drm] memory usable by graphics device = 4096M switching to inteldrmfb from EFI VGA

Then, there's the infinite blank screen.

I have a Thinkpad T570 with Intel Graphics.

Being a Linux user since 2005, and having spent hours on this -- I'm not sure what else to try. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Matt
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  • Did you check https://askubuntu.com/questions/162075/my-computer-boots-to-a-black-screen-what-options-do-i-have-to-fix-it/162078#162078 ? – ubfan1 Mar 18 '18 at 15:43
  • @ubfan1 yes, and none of the workarounds mentioned here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/BlankScreen#How_It_Works works. Only nomodeset does the trick. I also can't really check any of the logs, because it happens before my filesystem gets mounted (I'm sure about that, because it's encrypted and it happens before asking for password) – Matt Mar 18 '18 at 17:47

1 Answers1

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The problem turned out to be faulty RAM. I've sent it to Lenovo, and after three weeks they sent it back. Ubuntu boots properly now.

Matt
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