Ubuntu Server won't start

Question

I just installed Ubuntu Server again. I've done that quite a few times before.

I try starting the system and get to the point where it changes the font on the screen. A little while after that the monitor flickers and I just get a black screen. After that it flickers some more and doesn't respond to anything.

The weird thing comes when I boot into recovery mode. If I select resume boot (without even doing anything else) it resumes boot and finishes booting, giving me a shell. It definitely isn't just a graphics problem either since SSH won't respond (after resume boot it will let me in).

I put the syslog and the output of dmesg here. I can't distinguish between the failed startups and the successful ones.

Answer 1

I got the answer in chat.

I had to add nomodeset as a boot parameter to the kernel which made it work. I still get a fail on loading backup graphics device, but since i'll be using the server mostly via ssh that's not a problem.

(In short, it's likely the graphics driver fails in some way. I'm using an NVidia GT 620, which might be too new.)