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A few days ago I installed Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS. For some reason now it displays a black screen whenever I try to boot it up.

This is what I was doing before it happened.

I followed this guide to enable sound redirection on xrdp. Worked out fine and restarted the computer as was instructed at the end of the guide. However after it restarted it was stuck on the AsRock motherboard screen. I was unable to go into bios. I cleared the cmos and tried again. Bios works. The SSD containing ubuntu was still the boot drive- it even said ubuntu on it. I tried saving and exiting to no avail. Still stuck on AsRock screen.

In an attempt to fix it I just messed around with the bios settings and eventually it no longer showed AsRock. Instead it showed American Megatrends followed by a black screen. Whenever it is supposed to boot into ubuntu, it instead shows a black screen. Idk if the American megatrends thing is a big issue; if so please tell me.

I tried using boot repair multiple times on the installation usb, didn't work. I even tried checking the 'repair file system' and 'reinstall grub' options once- didn't work either. Here is the Pastebin for that. Grub doesn't show up (tried holding shift). It's just ami screen then black.

In case it expires: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/Z5XnY4Gf2J/.

I have not overlooked the fact that it says:

Please do not forget to make your UEFI firmware boot on the Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS entry (nvme0n1p1/EFI/ubuntu/shimx64.efi file) !

I'm not very familiar with how to do this, but then again every website suggesting boot-repair doesn't include this step. It's supposed to be just boot-repair, restart and boom fixed. Not the case for me.

In one of the online guides I saw that you could apparently reinstall ubuntu without losing data. That was my last resort as it mentioned it might not be able to restore the packages. I had no choice but to try it but to my disappointment there wasn't an option to do that... only wipe and reinstall.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

UPDATE: I have tried rEFInd boot manager, didn't work. I also managed to somewhat reverse the american megatrends; it now says AsRock again. However this time it doesn't freeze- it turns black like with ami. I ran boot-repair again this time enabling most advanced options, still didn't work.

UPDATE 2: I have found the culprit. It was xrdp-pulseaudio-installer. Wiped the system and restored home, etc, var directories. Rebooted to frozen AsRock screen again. Booted into usb, deleted var/lib/xrdp-pulseaudio-installer and rebooted again. Grub showed up this time with a bunch of errors: stuff like "Failed to start (service name)". Will update again soon.

Final update: I have fixed the problem. Xrdp-pulseaudio-installer messed up the boot, but it was probably all the messing about I did in an attempt to fix it that made the situation worse. I deleted xrdp-pulseaudio-installer from backup, restored full backup, booted into tty, sudo and su were broken so I fixed those, did apt get update/upgrade/dist-upgrade to no avail. Reinstalled xorg and gnome- everything back to normal. Bad thing is now my system is messy cause I chose minimal installation.

TurboSlayer
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  • Your other "last resort" would be booting up with a live medium, backing up your home directory to a separate drive, and wiping the disk and reinstalling from scratch, then restoring the home directory. – Jos Jan 15 '21 at 11:59
  • I backed up the whole ssd into my hdd using the installation medium earlier. If I restore the home directory, is that going to restore everything I added manually (especially packages)? Sorry I'm new to linux. – TurboSlayer Jan 15 '21 at 12:41
  • No, it will not restore packages, you will need to restore these yourself; however, once restored, packages will use the settings (such as personal preferences, etc.) that you have backed up and restored. – Jos Jan 15 '21 at 13:30
  • Having said that, there are tricks for listing all packages one one system (using sudo dpkg --get-selections) and, using that list, auto-installing these packages on another system. But it looks like it's too late to do step one now. – Jos Jan 15 '21 at 13:33
  • Yes, that would be an interesting question. I think it should be possible. The dpkg command probably consults an internal database, the location of which might be changed to point to the other system. Or it may be chroot ed or something. – Jos Jan 16 '21 at 09:33
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    Sorry I accidentally deleted the comment. I've done some research and I think there is a way: https://askubuntu.com/questions/724911 – TurboSlayer Jan 16 '21 at 11:23

1 Answers1

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I fixed the problem.

  1. Boot into installation media
  2. Delete var/lib/xrdp-pulseaudio-installer. Should be fixed but if issue persists do the following:
  3. Recovery mode- dpkg option. See if problem persists.
  4. Go into tty (normal/recovery mode) and reinstall essential packages (In my case it was xorg and gnome)
  5. Problem solved.
TurboSlayer
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