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After intitial installation, Ubuntu 18.04 boots to blank screen...and I mean blank... no cursor, no splash screen, nothing.

The install process went flawlessly, but after initial reboot, it always boots to a blank screen. I have tried this several times using several different USB sticks from several different download sources.

On this same computer, I have installed Manjaro, Fedora, Opensuse and LMDE without any problems. Debian didn't boot to a blank screen, but the resolution was AFU/unusable. Linux Mint(all DE) gives me the same problem...always boots to a blank screen and no possibility to enter GRUB menu.

My question is, how can I enter the GRUB menu?

I've seen about 75 trillion posts about this on the internet, so this is obviously a common problem, but every suggestion that I've read doesn't work for me.

I've tried -- escape, space, shift(both) repeatedly pressing and/or holding down, nothing has worked.

I'm not ranting here, and I understand/appreciate all of the effort/work that has gone into all Linux distros, butI have to ask myself...why in the hell isn't the GRUB menu defaulted to display upon start-up in case people have any problems?? Surely this would save a boatload of posts on many forums...I have been on many and read many similar problems, but never a DEFINITIVE solution.

Like I said, I appreciate all of the hard work that has ggone into these distros- but sometimes I think they're not helping themselves...maybe a sticky of some kind when you download Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, "if system boots to blank screen" do this; with specific terminal commands.

If it don't work, it don't work.

Thanks for your help

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  • Thanks for your reply. I'm not frustrated, just trying to use some common sense. PC #1 AMD 9655 (I think) Nvidia GTX1060 PC#2 AMD A6600 (APU) integrated graphics.
    – clown
    Aug 16, 2018 at 0:11
  • Please edit your question instead of buying information in comments. This is a question/answer format. The better your question, the better the answer you will get.
    – user535733
    Aug 16, 2018 at 0:17

1 Answer 1

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I will write an answer for you, but it makes some assumptions. Namely, that your install really worked, and the only issue you are having is that the video driver or something similar has issues.

Big picture outline of what this does:

  1. Boot to live session
  2. Mount the system partition on your disk
  3. Edit grub to always show the menu
  4. Update grub

Details

  1. Boot to a live session. The media you used to install it is fine. Choose "Try Ubuntu".
  2. Mount the filesystem

Find out what the partition you installed Ubuntu to is, by using lsblk. It's probably sda1 but that's not guaranteed.

Mount the ubuntu partition (change sdXX to your partition)

   sudo mount /dev/sdXX /mnt  

Mount the virtual filesystems:

        sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
        sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc 
        sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
        sudo mount --bind /usr /mnt/usr 

Change root to the mounted filesystem

sudo chroot /mnt  
  1. Make your changes to /etc/default/grub using nano

    Find the line GRUB-TIMEOUT_STYLE= and put menu after the =

    Make sure GRUB_TIMEOUT=10

    exit nano, saving your changes

    1. run the updater

update-grub

Exit chroot : CTRL-D on keyboard.

Unmount virtual filesystems:

   sudo umount /mnt/dev 
   sudo umount /mnt/proc
   sudo umount /mnt/sys 
   sudo umount /mnt/usr
   sudo umount /mnt

sudo reboot

It will ask you to remove the live media, and should reboot into your system and show you the grub menu.

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