Using 18.04LTS, and last month when it updated and needed to reboot to ‘finish’, it locked-up upon reboot and has been doing this ever since - I go to boot up, it gets to the blank screen where the mouse pointer shows up, and then the pointer freezes, the light for HD access goes out, and nothing is responsive - dead… So, hold down the power button, reboot, and it goes to the purple page with the count down and list, defaults, and boots up fine… thankfully there’s my VISTA64 laptop that works without all this grief, that I now have to depend on for daily work - and which btw works flawlessly (but no ‘updates’ to it to mess it up - too old for microslop). Think I’ll have to wipe drive and restore G4L backup image to fix unless someone knows what is bugging this thing… maybe then just cut off updates all together as they just seem to cause problems so who needs them ~ so much for LTS?
FYI - The thing did a couple of updates since this issue popped-up, but none required to be rebooted to ‘finish’ nor did they fix the boot/reboot bug… other bugs have seemed to gone away, finally!
LATER - latest Ubuntu update just required reboot to ‘finish’ again… rebooted and hung-up frozen - hit power button, reboots fine using ‘list’ w/ timer of purple page. SEEMS TO BE HANGING EVERY OTHER BOOTUP
WORKAROUND: (FOR MY TOUGHBOOK)…When booting up hit ‘esc’ when the ‘PANASONIC’ splash-screen comes up to go see the BIOS terminal output - Next, when the menu to select CD/HD/USB comes up to boot off of, arrow down to ‘HD’ and hit ‘enter’ - finally, if the purple screen comes up w/o the Ubuntu menu, hit ‘esc’ to get it to come up, then hit ‘enter’ selecting the default, now hold down power button to reboot. THE NEXT time around it will not go to the blank purple screen, but rather to the purple screen with the Ubuntu menu ~ hit ‘enter’ when it does and it will FINALLY fully boot (ie not hang) :-\
The problem you describe sounds like your system is stuck somewhere in the upgrade process somehow. I’d recommend our Ubuntu boot repair article, except you have reached the point of being able to boot in (even if it’s painful), so you may not need a live system to boot into.
It’s been thru several Ubuntu updates since the ‘corruption’, some have had the reboot now/later, and I’ve always gone with later after this bad experience. Oh, and still boot/hang/reboot issue. Looked into ‘boot repair’, but it’s not in the Ubuntu software list, and after doing a search for it, don’t believe I’m up to the complex install and don’t understand most of the instructions…- probably make things worse :-\
And from there choose the “recommended repair” in the window that appear.
You can always choose to reinstall the whole system, but in my opinion that is much more effort (timewise at least). Since you are able to boot in some way at the moment, I’d also advise to create a backup of important stuff before going further with the repair. Or do I get it wrong? From your last line I thought you are able to login after that magical HD->enter->esc->enter->power sequence.
I have a “G4L” image of the whole HD on a USB thumb drive, so “re-installing” would be done using it - takes a couple of hours [G4L = (norton) Ghost for Linux]
After doing the cold reboot (hold down power button) all is ‘normal’ and works fine.
Once I get back to going to the local LUG meeting, and had one of the guru’s there to help answer any ‘questions’ that boot repair install/use may spring on my unsuspecting gullible butt, perhaps that will be done. Meanwhile my black car w/o any A/C prevents me from attending (combined with my MS, cancer, etc) until the late fall/winter :-\
Still think that since that particular update broke it, the updates should eventually ‘fix it’ like they’ve done so many other times (reminds me of the old windoz updates - they’d break something just to scramble to fix it in the next update… never ending until upgrading…)
You got a point there, the next upgrade that involves kernel image update (which should happen in a week or so) may repair your issue, as it will change your grub setup to insert the new image into it.
Worth a try.
OK - so, today it updates and asks to reboot… told it I’ll shut down later.
When I did, and then rebooted, the thing looked like it crashed - kept going on about fsck not being able to work… rebooted and back to terminal screen with the same error (eg extent tree … level 2 …narrower? usb malfunctions…), but this time I typed in “fsck sda1” and it ran thru asking to do a bunch of repairs… kept just sayin’ ‘yes’ and let it finish back to terminal screen…
Rebooted (cold - hold down power button) and it came up without the hang… been booting without my work around and without hanging ever since!!!
This may have been a filesystem error, and that could be the root cause of the whole mess. Anyway, what matters is that the system is stable and running.
