Just installed Ubuntu Mate 16.04 64-Bit with full drive encryption. At first boot, worked perfect. I performed updates as normal on a newly installed linux system, and rebooted after a kernel update. At this point, the password prompt to decrypt the drive would not appear. I used the Advanced Options to load the earlier kernel and I am still able to use my install with the earlier kernel version. Could anyone assist me with troubleshooting so I can use the latest kernel?
What happens when you try to boot in the normal (default) way, (by your most recent kernel) and just wait a minute until you think it should be to the stage where you would expect the password prompt, and then enter the password into the darkness of the black screen and press enter? Will it complete the boot-up after a short waiting time?
Sorry for taking so long to get back, work has been crazy with the holidays. That was one of the first things I tried, thinking that maybe the GUI was just broken but that was a no go. I’ve noticed that on occasion the GUI prompt will show, but the resolution is extremely small compared to normal and still wont accept any keyboard input. Again, reverting to the older kernel seems to work.
Now that I have had some more time to play around, I have some new information. If I boot a into recovery for the latest kernel, you’ll see the scrolling output of the system starting to boot and then I can enter my decryption password at the prompt and just choose “Boot normally” from the recovery menu and get in to my system that way. This makes me think that perhaps to GUI for the disk encryption is broken somehow. So another question if the problem cant be fixed is, can I disable graphical disk decryption and just have regular output and decrypt via command line? I’d prefer that anyhow.
Yes you can do that by editing your grub.cfg.
I was about to suggest trying booting from command line GRUB and experimenting with video mode settings or making a backup of your grub.cfg and editing it. Here is a link that best describes what I was thinking, How to set NOMODESET and other kernel boot options in grub2 - p4man - Ubuntu Web Forums.
If you remove the words ‘quiet splash’ from the kernel options, your system should boot up with the text based scrolling output as you described.
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Thank you Herman, that actually worked well. However I reverted all settings back because I discovered that the cause of this issue is a bug involving the use of proprietary Nvidia drivers. I switched back to Work and no problems. Sheesh. I’m assuming switching to the earlier kernel was disabling the Nvidia driver which allowed for normal boot operations.
Thanks for the assist Herman, much appreciated!
Okay dafuq, thanks for being a good help and support recipient, I’m glad you managed to isolate the problem.
The proprietary nvidia drivers are great when they work. Maybe someday they will update their drivers and we’ll be able to use them again for a while.