My PC was working fine yesterday, but when I tried to boot it up today and selected Zorin OS from the GRUB menu, I just get a black screen.
Here is what I have already tried:
I edited the GRUB boot parameters by adding nomodeset and also tried selecting the safe mode/recovery options. However, the boot process either hangs or stops at "Loading initial ramdisk."
I even used the original USB drive I installed Zorin from. When I select the "Try or install Zorin with safe graphics" option, it also results in a black screen.
I really don't want to do a full reinstall and lose my setup. Has anyone experienced this before, or can someone please help me troubleshoot this?
Are Secure Boot and Fast Boot in BIOS disabled? Do You use a Nvidia Card? If yes: Have You installed Zorin with Nvidia Drivers or without? When You have a GRUB Menu, do You have Windows installed? If Yes: Is in Windows Fast Start-Up disabled?
· Secure Boot and Fast Boot: Both are disabled in BIOS
· GPU: Yes, I use an Nvidia card
· Installation: I had to install Zorin without the Nvidia drivers initially, then install them manually via apt later. This was due to a dpkg error that I found a solution for here on the forums.
· Windows: I have Windows installed in another SSD. (Not particion, a phisical)
Interestingly, after several reboots, the system booted normally. After some time...
Is there any specific log I could check to help understand what might have happened? I'd like to identify the root cause in case it occurs again.
If there was a kernel update that broke your system you could try to boot into the previous kernel. At the black grub menu during boot select Advanced options for Zorin, then select an older kernel to boot from to test. If the grub menu isn't shown at boot, press continuosly esc after pressing the start button to display it.
This part, in combination with black screen... Makes me think that your Nvidia card is not dumping vRAM on boot. I have experienced this one quite a few times.
Looking into it, the bug is reported:
You could try the nvidia.modeset=0 grub parameter:
Sorry to "reopen" this, but I'm still having issues and have some updates.
After a few days, the black screen error happened again. I did some more research and reinstalled the NVIDIA drivers (580 proprietary). This time, I can at least get to the login screen. However, right after logging in, the screen goes black again.
I thought it might be a problem with the Zorin desktop environment, so I tried reinstalling it, but that didn't help.
I found a temporary workaround: I can access a TTY with Ctrl+Alt+F5 , remove the monitors.xml file, and reboot. After doing this, the desktop loads correctly after login. The problem is that I have to repeat this process after every reboot, especially if the computer has been off for a long time.
Does anyone have any ideas what the root cause could be and how I can fix this permanently?
I disabled it, but it doesn't changed the behavior.
Also I stopped deleting the monitors.xml file, i just entered the TTY Ctrl+Alt+F5, and logged in. Then just typed reboot and as soon as my machine did it the monitor gave me the desktop environment. It is a curious case.