Hey everyone, I'm having a bit of a crisis with my Ubuntu laptop. It was working perfectly yesterday, and I didn't change anything—just used it as usual. Now, when I try to boot it up, it freezes on a black screen after the 'Loading initial ramdisk' message. Sometimes I see some EFI stub lines about secure boot, but that's about it. Both the normal and recovery modes from GRUB just get stuck too. I also noticed that the laptop is running quite hot while this is happening.
I attempted to edit the GRUB boot line by removing certain parameters like $vt_handoff and adding others like nomodeset, noapic, and acpi=off, but no success. As a last resort, I made a bootable USB with Ubuntu 24.04 using Rufus. While I can access the GRUB menu from the USB, selecting 'Try Ubuntu' or any of the graphics options just leads to that same black screen.
For context, my laptop has an internal Intel graphics card and a dedicated Nvidia one—could that be part of the issue? Would love any tips or insights on what else I can try to get it booted up again and how this might have happened in the first place.
2 Answers
Have you checked if secure boot is turned off? Sometimes that can cause boot issues with Linux. Just double-check it in your BIOS settings. If that’s not the issue, you might want to try booting using a different USB port or even another USB stick if you have one available. It could be a bad image or a faulty USB.
It sounds like a graphics issue could be at play here. Since you have both Intel and Nvidia, try going into the BIOS and disabling the Nvidia card to see if that allows you to boot. If you can get into the system, you might need to install the right drivers for your graphics setup.
I tried it both ways, and unfortunately, it didn't help.