Ubuntu 18.04 boots to blank purple screen

Question

My first install of Ubuntu was 16.04 with the only problems being with Ubuntu not wanting to play nice with my Nvidia graphics card. I later upgraded to 17.10 with no problems. I just now upgraded to 18.04. All appeared to go fine until the upgrade process finished and it asked to restart. I said okay. The system then rebooted to a blank purple screen.

If I forcibly power down and then turn power on I get to a grub menu. I can get in if I select an alternate boot option but when I shut down, the next time I boot up I'm right back at the blank purple screen.

On one of these alternate boots, I went in to XDiagnostics and turned on the options for extra debug logging and turned off the bootloader graphics. I can now see that Ubuntu apparently goes into an infinite hang on "a start job is running for detect the available gpus and deal with any system changes"

Is there a definitive fix for this?

If there is not a fix for this then how can I downgrade the install (without loss of data) to 17.10 which worked just fine?

Thanks.

Solution

Given that downgrading is not an option and given that I would prefer not to have to reinstall Ubuntu and then reinstall and reconfigure all the apps I've already set up, as a work around I am going to use the following solution which works for me:

1. Press right shift key when booting up.

2. When the Grub menu appears, select "advanced options for Ubuntu" and press enter.

3. Select "Ubuntu with Linux 4.13.0-41-generic" and press enter.

4. Log in.

It seems that the problem is with the 4.15 kernel and since I can't undo the upgrade from 17.1 to 18.04, I can use this method to fall back to the 4.13 kernel.

Is it a kludge? Yes. But one that is certainly preferable to a complete re-install.

Comments

[dhuyvetter]

Seem like this might be the same issue as inscribed here: askubuntu.com/questions/1036406/…

[Jim]

Similar but not the same. Searching tells me this is a wide spread problem that really needs to be addressed. I find it surprising that this error is happening since my Nvidia card is 4 years old and Nvidia is a key player in the GPU market.