Ubuntu 18.04 freezes within 5 seconds of booting

Question

I dual boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I updated Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 through the software updater. After installation, everything would boot normally, but every single time (within 5 seconds of getting to the login screen) Ubuntu freezes.

I tried booting from media and reinstalling through that, but even booting 18.04 from a flash drive results in the whole OS freezing within seconds.

From there, I wiped the entire dual boot by deleting the partition and deleting the boot order through the Windows command prompt. I made a 16.04 media tool to see if it would install and it did.

So with one last push I tried updating through 16.04 once more and unfortunately it did not work.

Out of options, and being unable to find someone with a similar enough problem to mine, I am opening my own question to see if we could figure this out.

Let me know any info you need from me that I can provide. This type of stuff is not necessarily my expertise, and I lack a lot of experience with Unix systems.

Here are some basic specs in case it is needed:

• CPU: Intel Core i7 6700K (Skylake)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 (EVGA)
• RAM: 16 GB

With 18.04 installed, I can access recovery mode if there's anything I can do from there, please let me know!

Answer 1

I went through many threads to try and find the correct answer. In fact, I even tried installing different Linux systems since I thought it was just Ubuntu, but to no avail. All of them just froze for some reason or got stuck on the loading screen.

So I hope others that have the same issue sees this answer, since it took me a long time to finally get my Ubuntu working.

Many people say that editing your grub by adding "nomodeset" after the "quiet splash" entry worked for them, but for me, it just froze everything and I didn't even get into my desktop.

Then I tried nolaptic and noaptic as well, but that did the same thing.(FYI, when you boot up, you go to advanced Ubuntu options, hit e, then go down to the line where you see quiet splash, hit end, navigate to just after quiet splash and then enter those entries, then you just hit Ctrl+x or F10 to save and boot)

So I deleted all of those entries (excluding quiet splash) and booted up again. This time, before the computer froze I entered tty2 (Ctrl+Alt+F2), and then simply installed the nvidia drivers via command line.

I guess you only need to use the second one, but just to be thorough, here are both.

sudo ubuntu-drivers list (gives you the available drivers for your device)
sudo ubuntu-drivers devices (gives you their names)

If you have the name, you just install them with apt.

Example:

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-390

When it's done, reboot and rejoice.

If only I found this earlier, it would have saved me a lot of time and effort.

Good luck to anyone else reading this.

Answer 2

Anthony, Sorry - no helpful expertise here - but I have the same symptoms.

• Acer Predator 15 (G9-591-74KN)
• Upgraded to 64GB RAM
• Intel Core i7 6700HQ Quad Core
• NVidia GEFORCE GTX 980M

From reading other threads and having followed them, the primary suspect seems to be nvidia graphics drivers. I've gone through: Ubuntu 18.04 and nVidia. Stuck after boot
Laptop problems with UBUNTU 18.04 Cannot get NVIDIA graphics card to work on Ubuntu 18.04

(edit: I followed all of the steps of the above threads before trying below)

I did a full and complete wipe and reload - let Ubuntu choose partitions, encryption of hard-drive, Boots fine, apt-get update; upgrade; dist-upgrade, and worked last night to accomplish my Raspberry Pi tasks at hand. Shutdown when I went to bed - and on power up today - I'm stuck again at the same point.

Removed "quiet splash" in grub command-line, so I could watch: command-line prompted for credentials to decrypt hard-drive - works; and all commands work properly until it loads the graphic screen requesting login credentials.

If I choose a short password - I can enter the password, and , but it locks up three or four seconds later.

This all seemed to happen ~ last couple of days of August / September 1 & 2 (2018). Prior to that, I had "timing" issues with logging in - maybe six months ago - if I entered decryption password too quickly - it would freeze (never display login prompt) - but if I waited 10 seconds before entering decryption password - all would go well; Two months ago, if I waited to enter encryption password - no login prompt, and I would have to rush entering encryption password to view login prompt; Now - I'm just out of luck regardless of any "timing"

I'll work with you through, but I too am out of ideas, and pulling my hair out trying to get a consistently functionaly system.