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I have bought a new Acer Aspire V3 laptop yesterday, which I wanted to have running with Ubuntu.
So I installed Ubuntu 14.04 from DVD which worked fine for me until this noon.

I tried to shut it down and it froze up on me. So I used the MagicSysRQ to get out of there and tried rebooting to see if everything was still ok.
It wasn't. The system wouldn't come up any more, sometimes it would get farther into the startup then other times.
E. G:

  • I could start typing my password but everything would freeze
  • The Ubuntu purple screen would appear, the dots below the logo moving for some time and finally coming to a halt.

Ok, maybe something was wrong with the harddrive so I inserted the DVD again and tried reinstalling Ubuntu, trusting that in the process the harddrive would be checked and cleaned. Since I just installed Ubuntu, the loss of data was negligable.

To put it in a nutshell: The installation did not even get close to the point where anything would be installed. Either it did not reach the start of any user interface at all or it hung up on me during one of the (early) steps.

So I tried booting from DVD and have the "try Ubuntu" option to check the hardware from there, but that would not work either. (Same results: Startups hanging in various stages).

Meanwhile I kept googling for similar problems and hopefully their solutions but to no avail so far. I just can't think of any reason that a system that would install fine one day could not be booted from another medium the other.

During Install as well as boot from medium I tried using the boot option "noplymouth" instead of "quiet splash". The messages shown until the start of xserver showed no errors, or at least none that I could see. Also in all cases I tried switching to some terminal using "CTRL+ALT+F1" but that wouldn't work either.

I am quite new to running Ubuntu, so yes, the task of using Ubuntu as sole OS on a new laptop might be a wee bit over my head.

I hope some of you have an idea of what might be wrong or at which part of my setup I might need to look. If I asked the wrong questions before, let me know as well. I really want this fella to run.

The hardware:

  • Acer Aspire V3-772G
    • Intel i7-4702MQ 2. 2GHz
    • Nvidia GeForce GTX 760M
    • 16 GB DDR3 L RAM
    • 1 TB HD
    • Blu-ray Disc RE drive
    • Acer Nplify 802.11 a/b/g/n + BT 4.0

After the n-th retry to get the laptop started it suddenly came back up as if nothing had happened. I ran some system checks I found on the system (which was not much, but then again, I am new with Ubuntu).

After playing around with it a bit I thought to try the much feared reboot and behold, it hung again. So I tried installing again now using bootoption "nomodeset" and I finally managed to get into the installation.

In some forum someone suggested to first get a clean install from USB/DVD without any updates whatsoever which worked as well. I tried rebooting the system and it hung up on me again (during shutdown).

So, I tried changing the Nvidia driver to the proprietary, tested one and adding NOMODESET to the grub. Tried rebooting ... and it hung up on me again (during shutdown). This time even the magic sysrq B does not work

Somehow I managed to get the system into a state, in which it would reboot, if that reboot was triggered from one of the Terminals (cTRL+ALT+F2 in my case). The login to Unity however does not work anymore, but leaves me in a state that has been thoroughly discussed here: Unity doesn't load no launcher no dash appearsUnity doesn't load, no Launcher, no Dash appears

The proposed answers did not my cause at all so I think something might be very much broken either with the software or hardware on my machine. I am not going to give up just yet.

After another round of reinstallation I installed a basic system with only English language support (previously German). Shutdown went awry again: When I was supposed to hit enter after ejecting the install medium nothing happened. After the reboot, I installed all updates first and then tried a reboot from Terminal (CTRL-ALT-F2) by using 

sudo shutdown -r now

Nothing happened until after two minutes some stack traces came dripping into the terminal.

rcu_sched detected stalls on cpus

and

task kworker/u16 blocked for more than 120 seconds

Google told me that this may occur during times of heavy harddisk traffic or due to some bugs in some older kernels, but I am lost why a newly installed system might be producing this traffic?

I realize that all of these problems might not have anything to do with one another but I cannot say for sure.

Community
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Christian Kullmann
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  • similar http://askubuntu.com/questions/460555/acer-aspire-v3-772g-suddenly-freezes-on-ubuntu-14-04 and http://askubuntu.com/questions/434366/trying-to-install-ubuntu-12-04-on-acer-aspire-v3-772g – bain May 07 '14 at 10:07

2 Answers2

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If your primary OS is Ubuntu: 1. Format the whole Hard disk. 2. Check for memory errors using any memory test tools (or) the Ubuntu's memtest tool. Recommended tool- Memtest86 3. Try to do the installation again. 4. Comment...

ProPlayerMaxUltra
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    Memtest is running now and will probably only finish tomorrow. I will keep you posted. – Christian Kullmann May 07 '14 at 19:52
  • Memtest completed successfully, i.e. with 0 errors. I will format and reinstall Ubuntu tonight again. I get the feeling that most of the problems might finally originate from the graphics card, but that is just a gut feeling right now. – Christian Kullmann May 08 '14 at 07:12
  • So i managed to do the following: 1) Repartition and format the HD 2) Install Ubuntu 3) Forget to install a boot partition 4) Install Ubuntu without repartioning 5) set "nomodeset" as GRUB_LINUX_DEFAULT (did this before too) 6) installed system updates 7) left the nvidia drivers as they were 8) used the reboot function in the GUI --> actually rebooted. – Christian Kullmann May 08 '14 at 21:08
  • So, honestly, i do not know what actually DID do the job but it might have been the reformating for all i know. The system came preinstalled with a "Linpus Linux" (or similar) and maybe, just maybe, my first Ubuntu install got tangled in that filesystem. – Christian Kullmann May 08 '14 at 21:10
  • Is Ubuntu working fine? – ProPlayerMaxUltra May 09 '14 at 09:42
  • I just tried the installation again and it is still working flawlessly. For now i assume the problem is solved due to your hint to format the hard drive completely. Any other issue i would ask in a separate question. Thank you. – Christian Kullmann May 09 '14 at 16:19
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A quick web search finds reports of crashes and BSODs for this laptop on both Windows and Linux. Hence it could be a hardware problem, or a firmware problem. Try upgrading to the latest BIOS from http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/drivers - Aspire V3-772G v1.15 released on 2014/04/28.

bain
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  • Thank you for your hint. I will try this as soon as i get home to the system and let you know how it worked. – Christian Kullmann May 07 '14 at 10:56
  • The bios update is available for Windows only. I am not quite sure if i should try using wine for that. Do you have a suggestion? – Christian Kullmann May 07 '14 at 19:51
  • If the bios upgrade fails it can brick your system, so no, I wouldn't use Wine. Poor show from Acer not to have a cdrom image for updates, there is a thread for the 771G where a few customers complain that their laptops shipped with Linpus Linux and now they can't update the firmware. – bain May 07 '14 at 23:36