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I am running into an issue during boot where the screen seems to get stuck right after it shows the "Loading initial ramdisk" log line, and then only displays a bunch of colored dots on the screen and a black box. I haven't found any logs that seem to indicate what might be going on and the few things I have tried from here and around the internet have not yielded any results.

See picture to better understand what I am talking about: enter image description here

I have not had this issue until yesterday. I have this computer running a few services on it but nothing major.

I can successfully boot into recovery mode and systemd mode (but only as a guest? Seems like a different problem.). When I boot into recovery mode I have full control over the terminal and can modify files, view logs, log in as myself, etc.

Thank you for the help!

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Please provide some information regarding your computer specifications, such as RAM and video card type, and your Ubuntu version.

Then, attempt to open the terminal on your default login screen with the following shortcut:

Ctrl + Alt + T

If that's not a possibility, log in (if possible) and open one of your built-in tty terminals, preferably tty4, accessible by the following shortcut:

Ctrl + Alt + F4

Type the following command in whichever terminal you have access to (if you have access to the default terminal, use that one):

unity --reset

Wait for the command to finish and see if it helps.

To get out of tty4, hold Ctrl, press Alt, and cycle through the function keys (F1 - F12) until you reach your default screen.

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    Okay so I figured it out, apparently a process was getting kicked off but then getting stuck in a loop or something and preventing the computer from continuing its boot routine. Thanks to your tip and now knowing how to jump into the terminal, I was able to debug that and disable it.
    – Sj.
    Nov 18, 2016 at 4:07
  • No problem. What was the name of the bugged program that got kicked off? This will help for future reference.
    – Krieger
    Nov 18, 2016 at 4:09
  • It looks like it was noip2 (was using it for ddns)
    – Sj.
    Nov 18, 2016 at 4:10
  • That sounds a bit sketchy! Careful using programs like that.
    – Krieger
    Nov 18, 2016 at 4:13
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    Yeah I think I may have learned a lesson today.
    – Sj.
    Nov 18, 2016 at 4:21

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