Weird Black Screen Issues, Cannot even boot to LiveCD - Previously Stable System

Sorry to come here with yet another “black screen linux boot issue” but this is a much weirder error than I’ve ever seen before.

Last night I left my computer on as I always do only to come back in the morning to find out that my laptop was unresponsive with the fans running on high. I’ve encountered this issue on Ubuntu derivatives many times and assumed it was no big deal, so I held down the power button to shutdown the PC.

Here’s where the problem starts. Now I cannot get the PC to boot into any of the following (if I hold spacebar after passing the bios screen, normal boot sequence still yields black screen):

  • pop_os (current kernel)
  • pop_os (old kernel)
  • pop_os (recovery)

I have also run the onboard diagnostics which doesn’t show any errors however I haven’t run the full memtest yet.

Booting from a LiveCD image of either the Nvidia or Intel graphics variant does not solve the black screen issue. Specifically, when I select the LiveCD to boot from I get a black screen immediately after selecting the drive.

I cannot interact with these black screens at all. Pressing any combination of ALT’s and CTRLs does not get me to a terminal or show me any signs of life. The only way I know that the computer is on is due to the keyboard lighting being on and the fans making a low constant hum.

Another small detail is that once passing the boot screen all of my peripherals get disconnected.

Some more information about my setup:

  • PC: Alienware 13 R3
  • OS: Pop OS 20.10
  • I have not had any issues with Pop OS outside of this occasional freeze but it has always recovered in the past.
  • My drive is encrypted, so normally at boot I am presented with a screen asking me to decrypt the drive. I do not see this screen in this scenario.
  • I have not recently applied any updates but IDK if popos has done anything automatically in the background.

I’m truely lost in this situation since I’ve never encountered a situation where I can’t even get a LiveCD working. Any help is greatly appreciated.

This kinda sounds like a hardware/firmware issue to me. To find out whether the problem is Linux or something else, could you try booting a Windows installation disc?

Yeah I would normally think that at this stage as well but I’m not sure if there is any weird interplay between the encrypted drive, nvidia drivers and grub. I’m downloading the windows ISO now.

I finally got the windows ISO burnt but it seems like I’m facing the same issue. I see the windows logo and the loading symbol but after that part I still get the same black screen.

Probably going to find a screw driver and start unplugging stuff at this point.

I unplugged and replugged every combination of ram and disks with no luck. I think the last step in diagnosis is to test display port.

The fact that you can see the windows logo does that also mean you can see part of the boot process on Linux? If you can find out where in the boot process it turns black that’s probably the culprit.

Just to be sure, did you apply any overclocks that might not be as stable as you thought?

I’ve never overclocked the PC.

I also took it over to a friends house and we put Acronis on it and booted to like 5 different OS’s in various combinations of UEFI and Legacy. None of them could access graphics at all. Even using Ultimate Boot CD failed when we tried to open the VRAM test and Memtest. We also tried swapping to different ram with no luck.

I think the graphics card is dead :cry:

It sounds like your issues are starting, not necessarily when the OS takes over execution from grub or firmware, but when the OS tries to switch from basic graphical drivers used by the firmware (VESA/UGA/GOP) to a full-fledged GPU driver like nouveau or nvidia.

Can you reach a GRUB screen? I think the best next step would be to boot with all applicable GPU drivers blacklisted, or try booting without a GUI at all, and see what is going on.

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This is not my screenshot but I do have access to the grub line as shown. Not sure what I need to add to disable anything related to graphics drivers though.

Edit: I tried doing nomodeset and that didn’t do anything. As I said earlier, even if a utility such as Memtest is run, the screen still doesn’t display anything. AFAIK memtest doesn’t use any graphics at all so it shouldn’t error out.

I was thinking of something along the lines of editing the grub menu entry before running it to include one of the following settings for GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text

Or adding text or 3 to the end of the linux line, to boot into non-GUI mode; which one works may be distro-specific, but I think runlevel 3 is more widespread.

linux … 3

Or by blacklisting the drivers directly (assuming your only GPU is Nvidia). I am taking the list of modules to blacklist from this page about keeping a VM’s GPU from being initialised, which (if full GPU initialisation is where your failure occurs) is exactly what we want.

linux … modprobe.blacklist=nouveau,nvidia,nvidia_uvm,nvidia_drm,nvidia_modeset

Yes, that is very confusing; if the above also fails, maybe a RAM issue is partly to blame, though if you have discrete Nvidia graphics, it should not be using your RAM as graphics memory, right?

I wanted to resolve this thread with a finalized list of things I tried before I gave up and bought a new laptop.

I did some more testing and even with different ram, when I did the extended memory test the computer just freezes.

I’ll probably just scrap the laptop for parts now that I have a new one.