Trouble upgrading my desktop to 18.04

Support & Help Requests
#1

Hello world… first post to this forum and a cry for help.

After installing the upgrade from 17.10, it would not reboot, just hang on the logo screen.

Hitting Esc goes to a log, and I see it’s apparently having persistent trouble starting the Light Display Manager (suggests running systemctl status lightdm.service) also Detect the avail… ( gpu-manager.service) …

I have an Nvidia card and use the proprietary 390 driver … I managed to boot into terminal mode, and am able to startx to get into graphical wonderland, sort of … and was able switch to the open source graphics drivers, but it was no help., same behavior.

What should I try next?

#2

If it was me:

Boot up with a live CD, grab all of your personal files and dump a copy of them onto a usb.

Re-write the system with a new install of 18.04

In my opinion, based on personal experience, doing the above is likely to be a lot quicker and less fraught than trying to figure out what has gone wrong with the existing upgrade and then trying to fix it.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks, Steve. A fresh install should resolve some bugs that have crept into my system.

I made a fresh usb stick and booted the new 18.04, formatted a fresh disk partition and installed to it with the updates and drivers. All went well, apparently, but GRUB failed to get the word… rebooting with the GRUB default lead to the same trouble because it was booting the same broken partition. I rebooted with the stick and learned about grub-repair.

Looks like I’m on the right track… thanks for your advice.

#4

Glad to hear you sorted it.

I don’t know if you repaired Grub manually or if you used what I am about to describe. In case you didn’t (and for future reference) if you haven’t already heard of it, Ubuntu Boot Repair is a little app you can download and install whilst in the live environment that will automate the Grub repair for you with no more than a few clicks of the mouse. You just need to visit the link, below, whilst in the live environment, and follow the instructions.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

#5

A google search quickly led me to the boot-repair utility (which I mis-remembered as grub-repair.) It worked well; I did have to check the options as I set up a separate /boot partition this time around.