Ubuntu 17.10 boots forever after update. Is it normal?

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 17.10. My Update Manager installed some updates (maybe for 18.04) and asked for a reboot, which I did. Now my laptop has been booting for about two hours. Is this normal? If not, is there any way to fix it?

Answer 1

I got bricked yesterday when my HWE kernel updated to 4.13.0-39. It also looked like it was just stuck. It went through a number of various system status lines about two thirds down my screen and then nothing. It looked like it was just going to boot forever. Not so. The system was actually done loading, it was simply unable to start the GUI. When you get to the point where the system appears to be stuck in a 'boot loop', try this key combo to get the text-based login prompt: Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F7. I know that there may be more than one combination and if there are additional combinations that people know about, please comment. On my laptop it's Ctrl+Alt+F1.

I have a pet supercomputer for scientific computing. There appears to be some kind of a problem with the linux-headers package in that kernel. I have the 1070 video card. I was able to recover from this minor disaster. See if you have the same problem. Try this (if you have this particular kernel, the problem also exists in the -38):

uname -a

if the answer is a -38 or -39 kernel, then you have a problem. If you have the -38 kernel, change the line below accordingly of course.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-4.13.0-39-generic

If your machine decides to do an installation, then you have a problem. Good, let it install. After that:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-396

Reboot and your system should come back to life. Mine did.