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About two weeks ago my system started having black screen hang ups.

I can now only get a few minutes use after the login before the system hangs. After that I cannot ATL-CTRL-# to another console. I am forced to ssh from a remote system. From that system I can see Xorg is 100% and cannot be killed with -9 so only the power button can reboot.

System is Alienware X18m R2 with two Nvidia 675 and 24GB mem

Setup was: 18.04 Ubuntu Gnome desktop Nvidia driver 390.132 Dual boot to Windows 10

I have tried the following resolutions:

Reinstalling the nvidia drivers.  
Trying another window manager. Now running light DM.  
Trying another desktop manager. Now running MATE.
Updated to latest recommended 18.04 kernel 5.3.0-51-generic

Nothing has changed the behavior with the exception of running off the nouveau driver.

What I have noticed is more use leads to more frequent hang ups. When I say more use even scrolling quickly up and down a menu can cause this to happen. However monitoring temperatures and usage does not reveal anything. Anyway booting into Windows the same hardware is working reliably.

My next test will be to reinstall the original Ubuntu 18.04 with the Nvidia 390 drivers. If that runs fine for a few days I will update and see what happens.

Any other ideas?

Walter ZAMBOTTI
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2 Answers2

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I think here this post already have discussed solution to your problem as he also have no response to CTRL+ALT+F1. I am copy paste as it is. Please refer post Black screen at boot after Nvidia driver installation on Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS for more detail:

I'm posting an answer to my question as I managed to solve the problem (thanks to the AskUbuntu community). This may not be a completely generic answer, but I will explain the steps which I followed in case it helps someone else. Here's how I did it:

1. Connecting to a terminal

I followed the instructions to edit the commands before booting, namely replacing quiet splash with nomodeset and then pressing F10 or Ctrl+X to boot (instructions are provided here). After I booted, I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F1, Ctrl+Alt+F6 and Ctrl+Alt+F7 repeatedly one after the other. After several tries (had to reboot and retry several times), I eventually got a terminal with ultra low resolution where I had to enter my login and password, which I did.

2. Uninstalling the wrong Nvidia driver

I used the command provided by Marmayogi to uninstall the incorrect Nvidia driver:

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

The next time I rebooted Ubuntu, I was able to access the login page and GUI in ultra low resolution, like before I installed the wrong Nvidia driver.

3. Installing the correct Nvidia driver

Here I followed the instructions provided by Marmayogi in his comment to my question, except for the installation command of the Nvidia driver which was incorrect as it has changed (see the answer by Kerry Kobashi in this post for details):

  1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
  2. sudo apt-get update
  3. sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-410 (this is the new command, also check version number of driver first!)
  4. Reboot.

After rebooting the GUI was in a normal resolution (except GRUB which was still in low resolution, but it's less of a problem). To check that everything went well, I issued the following command: lsmod | grep nvidia, and there was output, so the installation was successful.

Here I am want to stress out that you need to check which version of the Nvidia driver you need (i.e. which is compatible with your graphics card). You can check on the Nvidia website which products are supported by each driver (the latest one is usually the best if you have a recent graphics card). Not doing so and blindly following instructions in another post which did not specify this is what led me to having all these problems in the first place (unfortunately, this point is too often ignored in a lot of posts I've seen on the subject). Also when choosing the version, I read somewhere that you only need to write the main version (don't bother about the number after the point, so if latest driver is 418.56, just write 418).

Ajay
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  • Unfortunately I have already tried all the suggestions in that thread, to no avial. The output from lsmod and nvidia-smi both indicate I have a successful install. Successfully wrong in my instance. I know the driver is working because I can successfully log in and open simple windows. But if I open a browser or resize a terminal window or hover over a menu with hints then BOOM black screen. This smells of an update regression. – Walter ZAMBOTTI May 15 '20 at 12:15
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Thanks for all the help.

In the end I managed to resolve the issue by rebuilding the hardware. The M18x R2 has two nvidia 675m cards and so I swapped them around since Linux does not support SLI for mobile type cards.

Everything seems to be working now.

I have no explanation for why the system was working without issue for Windows 10. I can only guess the Windows drivers are more tolerant of hardware issues.

So in summary : suspected hardware issue.

Walter ZAMBOTTI
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