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I just spent a day trying to work around my newly upgraded Ubuntu 14.04 booting into a black screen without success and becoming seriously desperate.

What I did: Upgrade to 14.04 LTS from 13.10 via command line. Everything proceeded without problems.

The status now: GRUB shows. After I select any Ubuntu starting option I still have on my system, the Ubuntu start screen with the dots appears, changes into a black screen with a white cursor in the upper front corner. At this stage nothing will get me out of this besides a manual restart (Alt + F1 or F2 does not work, no keyboard reactions otherwise). This effect also happens with the Ubuntu 13.10 kernel stilled imaged on the system. Graphics failsafe modes won't boot at all. I can get to a text mode boot via selecting recovery mode and from there return to normal boot --> login to 14.04 works, but no display is recognized.

My System:

Thinkpad X1, dualboot with Windows 7. Intel HD 4000 graphics card. There is no file /etc/X11/xorg/conf.

lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 vga Yields:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0166] (rev 09)

Subsystem:

Lenovo Device [17aa:21f9] Kernel driver in use: i915 00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller[8086:1e31] (rev 04)

/usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p yields:

No protocol specified
  Error: unable to open display

What I tried: Many suggested solutions from other forum threads, including Resetting unity, dpkg --reconfigure, several installations and re-installation of fglrx / nouveau / nvidia graphics drivers, reinstalling X, .......

Booting 14.04 from a live USB, which works great and enables me to write this post, but I don't manage to fix my local 14.04 installation

guntbert
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Alice
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    possible duplicate of My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it? – Panther Jun 05 '14 at 19:51
  • generally speaking, when you have a problem with an upgrade, it takes longer to debug it then to do a fresh install. A fresh install will preserver your data in /home. My general policy, if I can not fix an upgrade within 20 min, fresh install. Support for failed upgrades is limited. With that in mind, check your logs for errors. – Panther Jun 05 '14 at 19:53
  • Hi, @bodhi.zazen: Thanks for the link to the former thread. I already went through it, tried the suggested solutions with no success. How can I proceed to a fresh install without loosing my data? E.g. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade shows me everything is already perfectly up to-date .. – Alice Jun 05 '14 at 20:02
  • Your data in /home is preserved "Since Hardy it is possible to reinstall Ubuntu without losing the content of the /home folder (the folder that contains program settings, internet bookmarks, emails and all your documents, music, videos and other user files). This can be done even if /home is not on a separate partition" see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuReinstallation . If you have data outside of /home it of course gets more interesting, but you have several back up strategies. – Panther Jun 05 '14 at 20:06
  • I have a physical update of all my data on an external drive generated with ubuntu simple backup. I just went to the first screen of a reinstall of 14.04. from a life USB I generated today and my options were installing it alongside the broken 14.04 on my system or loosing all data. From my broken 14.04 I cant run ubuntu installer since i cant boot.. – Alice Jun 05 '14 at 20:09
  • See the link I gave you regarding data in home. There can always be a problem with installations so worse case you might need to restore from backup. As it is now, you are looking at either a non-functional system or a fresh install and restoring from backup. As indicated in the link, ubuntu is designed to preserve data in /home, so you really have noting to loose. – Panther Jun 05 '14 at 20:13
  • Hi, thanks a lot for the link which reads good! But my question is how I could get into the ubuntu installer as it is the first step in the how to if I am not able to boot beyond a black screen. I am not sure how this could work, maybe from a life usb test system? – Alice Jun 05 '14 at 20:17
  • Yes, you boot the live usb and install from there. install into the old ubuntu partition without reformatting. you may need to use advanced partitioning. – Panther Jun 05 '14 at 21:30
  • Thanks! The fresh install worked and I still have access to my files. Nevertheless, I now cannot login in the graphical Ubuntu 14.04., after typing my password the same login screen keeps reappearing. Login works fine in text mode. (Also my network is not working, but I guess this is then another question) – Alice Jun 05 '14 at 21:53
  • Probably a corrupt config file in your home directory. http://askubuntu.com/questions/17610/how-do-i-reset-my-unity-configuration – Panther Jun 05 '14 at 21:57
  • Hi, it turned out the login loop was due to wrong permissions of .Xauthority as explained here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/223501/ubuntu-gets-stuck-in-a-login-loop. Thanks for the how to for the fresh install, I would like to accept that as a very helpful answer to my problem. None of my network adapters is working (no ethernet, wifi, bluetooth) but I will post that probably better as a new question. – Alice Jun 06 '14 at 07:13
  • I just realized USB is also not working. I posted that as new question here http://askubuntu.com/questions/477543/usb-and-network-adapters-dont-work-after-ubuntu-14-04-fresh-install-no-etherne

    Thanks a lot for the fast suggestions!!

     – Alice Jun 06 '14 at 07:42

2 Answers2

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I had the the same issue. I re-installed from scratch after backing up my home directory. After the fresh install of 14.04.1 I still got a black screen when booting. I then selected the advanced options in the grub boot loader, selected start networking, then went to a root shell and ran 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get upgrade' and the next reboot worked fine. Just thought I would share in case these easy steps help anyone else.

Brad
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As suggested by bodhi.zazen, a reinstall of 14.04. from a life USB following this link enabled me to boot into 14.04. without loosing my /home/ data.

Alice
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