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I am running ubuntu 21.10 on a dell XPS 15 laptop. It was working great until the other day when I would get a black screen at boot time.

I can start it in recovery mode, select 'resume' from the recovery menu and ubuntu will launch but only as a text command line, no GUI.

My laptop is dual-booted with Ubuntu and windows 11. Windows boots fine.

EDIT: I have run fsck from a live CD and the output is now:

/dev/nvme0n1p7: clean, 362747/15261696 files, 28576717/61019392 blocks

Where nvme0n1p7 is my ubuntu partition. So everything seems to be fine with the filesystem.

EDIT: Something else I've tried is enabling networking and then running dpkg from the recovery menu to repair broken packages and I get this output:

Reading cache
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
No candidate ver: google-chrome-stable
No candidate ver: linux-image-5.11.41-generic
No candidate ver: linux-image-5.11.49-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-5.11.41-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-5.11.49-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-extra-5.11.27-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-extra-5.11.41-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-extra-5.11.49-generic
No candidate ver: teamviewer
No candidate ver: zoom

Calculating the changes
No candidate ver: google-chrome-stable
No candidate ver: linux-image-5.11.41-generic
No candidate ver: linux-image-5.11.49-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-5.11.41-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-5.11.49-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-extra-5.11.27-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-extra-5.11.41-generic
No candidate ver: linux-modules-extra-5.11.49-generic
No candidate ver: teamviewer
No candidate ver: zoom


Finished, please press ENTER

I used dpkg purge to remove google chrome, zoom, and teamviewer but to no effect. I'm more cautious removing / reinstalling the system related packages, especially since I don't know if that will solve anything.

anyone have any ideas / need more info?

sling jones
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  • You have to use a live CD to run fsck. Try that first. – Emoji Apr 05 '22 at 00:05
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    You don't need to run fsck from a live session, but you can't run it on a mounted file system. Try fsck /dev/nvme0n1p7 from a root shell prompt: https://askubuntu.com/a/92558 – Nmath Apr 05 '22 at 00:32
  • I've tried running fsck from a live CD and it gave me the output I put in above. – sling jones Apr 05 '22 at 13:16
  • Can you describe your actions leading up to the problem's onset? Generally, apt is preferred over dpkg for package management as it's more user-friendly. As far as the dpkg output you posted, it's hard to comment on any command's output without knowing the actual command that was run. Originally you asked about fsck but now you are talking about broken packages but there's not any explanation for that. Can you edit your question and include more details? Why do you think packages are broken? Which ones? Any ideas how it happened? Tag me @nmath or I'll miss it – Nmath Apr 06 '22 at 00:03
  • @Nmath I'm going though the recovery menu options to see if I can glean anything from them, the options being: Resume normal boot, try to make free space, dpkg repair broken packages, fsck check all filesystems, grub Update grub bootloader, enable networking, drop to root shell prompt, system summary. I'm going off of these options because I am not sure what could have caused this problem and they seem like a good starting point. I guess I could use help understanding what 'loading inital ramdisk' does and why boot could get stalled there other than my random stabs at possible causes – sling jones Apr 06 '22 at 01:44
  • A root shell prompt with networking lets you run any command as the root user (God mode) -- But it's hard to tell you what you need to do if we don't know what caused the problem. If you really have no idea, it might be prudent to just reinstall the OS. If you want to access the file system with a desktop environment, you can use a live session (Try Ubuntu from an installation USB) – Nmath Apr 06 '22 at 04:41

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