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Whenever I switch my old Dell E520 on first thing in the morning it fails to boot into Ubuntu 16.04. It gets through bios to grub & beyond but will stop while trying to load the os. It finishes at a black screen. This seems a common problem & I've tried all the suggested solutions appropriate to my setup from the My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it? thread, but none have worked for me.

What seems different from any other solution or discussion offered is that I have found a strange workaround: if I get to grub & run memtest for a minute then press esc to reboot, all is well! This works every time.

My questions are: Can anyone suggest why this works? Is there a solution that does not need my intervention at grub?

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  • Could you please add a little more detail? What exactly did you try and what happened? Did you encounter any warning or error messages? Please reproduce them in their entirety in your question. You can select, copy and paste terminal content and most dialogue messages in Ubuntu. (see How do I ask a good question?) Feb 3, 2017 at 0:54

2 Answers 2

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Add nomodeset to your grub commandline.

Edit your /etc/default/grub file.

Look for this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Append nomodeset to the line so it looks like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

Now update your grub with:

$ sudo update-grub

Then reboot.

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  • I have already tried that, & many other grub file alterations, but none have worked for me.
    – zhdeef
    Feb 1, 2017 at 12:12
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This is a thermal problem, but it's reversed from the usual heat issues. One of the connections in your system RAM slots is only making contact when the system has warmed up a bit -- as it'll do after one or more boot failures, or after running memtest for a short time. Try removing and reseating your RAM modules, and you'll probably find the wiping action of the contacts brings back reliable connection and resolves the problem.

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  • This certainly fits the fault profile. I'll try it over the weekend & report back. Thanks.
    – zhdeef
    Feb 2, 2017 at 11:30

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