Ubuntu: Blank screen, blinking cursor on boot
Channel: Roel Van de Paar
Date: 2019-06-20

Ubuntu: Blank screen, blinking cursor on boot


The Question: Occasionally my Ubuntu 10.04 PC won't boot properly. It gets past Grub and then
stops at a blank screen and blinking cursor. From what I've read, this blinking
cursor screen is presented by Ubuntu itself and not Grub, so I assume the boot
process gets halted for some reason. Has anyone any guidance on how to diagnose
this issue or what the cause is likely to be? Normally I need to press the
reset button to reboot the PC and often it will reboot fine. The fact that it
is intermittent is what confuses me.
Any pointers on diagnosing the problem would be much appreciated.
----
***** Edit: *****
 It's been a while, mainly because my server has been up for a long
 time. It looks like I've captured a recurrence of this issue, I
 copied the messages file and the dmesg file and had a look where
 processing seems to have stopped and found the messages below. I'm
 going to do some research on Google etc. but figured I'd put it up
 here in case anyone can help and wants to earn themselves some
 points. I should mention that the ondemand governor failed message
 happens on successful boots but the other two don't appear to.
Oct 11 23:17:21 linux kernel: [ 98.905370] ondemand governor failed, too long
transition latency of HW, fallback to performance governor
Oct 11 23:21:48 linux kernel: Kernel logging (proc) stopped.
Oct 11 23:21:48 linux rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="4.2.0"
x-pid="697" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] exiting on signal 15.
I found a few vague references to rolling over of logfiles at boot time being
the cause

Solutions Sample (Please watch the whole video to see all solutions, in order of how many people found them helpful):

== This solution helped 21 people ==
Hold shift during boot, then hit e to edit the GRUB entry. Remove the part that
says "quiet splash" and replace it with "text" to see what's happening during
boot.

== This solution helped 1 person ==
I have had this problem in the past, and found that it appears to happen on
some kernels and not others although I have not had this issue since upgrading
to Meerkat. But often times I found I would have to select a prior Kernel to
load into Ubuntu properly.

== This solution helped 1 person ==
I like maco's answer, but another thing I'd check is that your hard drive is
healthy. Check in System ＞ Administration ＞ Disk Utility, look at the SMART
status, it should be "Disk is healthy," otherwise your drive might be failing.

== This solution helped 1 person ==
I've had that problem quite a few times now, but I could distinguish at least
three different variants:
 * resumes boot after pressing Enter
 * resumes boot without doing anything, after a while
 * never resumes boot, but accepts ctrl-alt-del, indicating that there's
 still some life in the kernel
This has led me to believe that when you see what you're describing, the actual
problem is that the quiet boot option is hiding "something" from you. For
instance, I could track down one of my incidents to the system recovering (not
the usual routine check) my harddisk. I have since removed the quiet option
from my grub entries.

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