Ubuntu

16.04 would not boot after installation

Asked by Janos G. Komaromi

This is a "mature" 32 bit machine. Had 12.04, then distro upgraded to 14.04, and recently distro upgraded to 16.04. After that it did not boot, so I decided to rebuild the machine with a virgin installation (reformat, etc.) Installation completed successfully, but after that the machine would not boot into the new installation. Grub is there, boot process starts, even gets to the stage when the x-server starts, but then it falls back to VGA mode (screen shows fsck result being OK) and continues to start x-server, and so on and on, repeating this loop.

Note (1): I can start 16.04 from the CD tray Ubuntu mode. If I look at syslog and xserver.0.log from the mounted 16.04 root filesystem (the one that would not boot) I can see no obvious reason for this behavior of getting stuck in a loop at boot process, although I have limited expertise in Ubuntu architecture.

Note (2): Rescue mode does not help either

Note (3): again, this is a 32 bit desktop machine with Athlon Duron CPU and nvidia chipsets. The machine has been running well with 12.04 or 14.04 (except for a still outstanding scanner bug on 14.04, but I don't think it has anything to do with this failure to boot on a shiny new 16.04 installation.

Note (4): I checked, I have plenty of free disk-space, and if I dual boot into my old Fedora-3 installation everything is fine. Therefore I do not think the problem would be hardware failure.

Note (5): finally (if it helps) the display is a 24" LCD. Booting from the 16.04 CD in live session mode the resolution is 1920x1080, and everything is fine. Just booting into the installed 16.04 on the hard disk fails with an endless loop between text and graphics mode.

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Janos G. Komaromi (jankom) said : 		#1

Update: System finally did boot - accidentally. I use this box rarely to boot Ubuntu, most of the time I boot into an old fedora-3. Just for info, and if it helps anybody, including the developers, I think the problem is related to system motherboard in power up state. If I completely cut power to the computer (pull the plug and remove Ethernet cable - I realize, cmos battery is still there, so strictly speaking this is not completely dead) then my computer did boot into 16.04.
It looks like using reboot option from fedora-3, or even using a dual boot feature prevents 16.04 to complete the boot process and enter into the loop described above.
I don't know if this is normal behavior, but I thought I'd bring this into the attention of anybody who reads this - and maybe help somebody with the same problem.
As far as I'm concerned I would close this bug but don't know how.
Janos

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#2

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.