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I had a fully functional 19.04 machine until I rebooted today. Now the machine boots to a blinking cursor on a black screen. Since pressing the power button results in an immediate shutdown, it appears nothing has loaded.

I see there are a couple of other posts regarding 10.04 and booting. However, I can't try any of the suggestions as these there methods all go to a blinking cursor - booting from HD - holding left shift while booting - booting from a 19.04 USB

System is a Dell 8900 with NVIDA graphics, i7 processor. Had been running 18.04 without problem for a year. 19.04 was installed as a fresh install, not upgrade.

The same thing happened a few days ago but I was able to hold down left shift, get into the utility (not sure what it is called), updated GRUB and then it rebooted.

Any suggestions?

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  • If you want to boot from external media you need to open UEFI settings and use the boot override or the one-time boot menu. It's an hardware characteristic/feature independent of the installed OS.
    – user880592
    May 7, 2019 at 18:03
  • Thanks @GabrielaGarcia, I had already done that.
    – klequis
    May 7, 2019 at 18:25
  • After a few more tries to boot from USB it succeeded. I exited without doing anything. Then I changed the boot options so the only choice was 'Hard drive' which in my case is the Ubuntu 19.04 install. System booted just fine. A bit of a mystery going on.
    – klequis
    May 7, 2019 at 18:26
  • It has been 9 days since I disabled all Gnome extensions and I have experienced no problems since. Looks likely it was an extension problem.
    – klequis
    May 16, 2019 at 13:11

1 Answer 1

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I had this problem with an nvidia card and Ubuntu 19.04 on a desktop. Workarounds that I found were:

  • When at the screen with the blinking cursor, press Ctrl+Alt+F2 and then Ctrl+Alt+F1 (or some variation of this until the login screen appears).
  • Use the lightdm package to handle logins instead of gdm (however, I found a minor issue with the mouse cursor size with a 4K display when I used this solution).
  • Edit /lib/systemd/system/gdm.service and comment out the ExecStartPre line with a '#' and then add ExecStartPre=sleep 5
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