Can't boot; black screen with underscore cursor

Hello

My zorin has stopped booting. All I get is the zorin bios loading screen, a very quick flash of what looks like a numbered list, then a black screen with a white underscore at the top left _

Before this happened, my system warned that there was only 400MB of hard drive space left. The system was extremely laggy.

I thought it may be due to Timeshift backups, so I tried to open that, but it kept saying it was in the middle of a backup, so to try in a few minutes. This is the point where I rebooted and now I am unable to access my system at all.

It looks like the backups are what's caused the instability, but I've no idea how to get back on to my desktop to fix it.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Hey, how would I initiate that please?

So to confirm, I need a live usb for this? If so, I'm stuck, as I'd need my machine to make one.

I don't. Is there anything I can do to try and fix as-is? I'll be able to access anywhere computer but not sure when that would be.

No luck. I can't get it to show the menu. I just keep ending up back at the cursor screen.

Have you tried pressing the Shift key rapidly after turning on to get the GRUB menu?

If not working and you are at the point of the flashing cursor, try Ctrl+ Alt+ F1 to get a tty terminal open. If you can, you shoul be able to login in terminal mode and then CD (change directory) to where your timeshift snapshots are kept. Check the contents and remove the ones in between first snapshot and last snapshot.

I know but it says hold. When I have had issues I have had to do continuous rapid presses of the Shift key to get GRUB menu to show, not holding it down as in the article. :wink:

1 Like

A post was split to a new topic: Boot halts at blank screen with blinking cursor

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.