Two 23.10 to 24.04 upgrades - one good, the other not so much

Support & Help Requests
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Well after multiple warning like notifications about EOL on 23.10 - I threw caution to the wind and upgraded two machines to 24.04 from 23.10. A Shuttle XH61V went smoothly, but the Dell Optiplex 7010 is messed up. Booting into kernal 6.8.38 results in a black screen. Drives are not encrypted, and are using ext4 fs. Booting into kernal 6.5.44 results in a frozen gray screen with “ding initial ramdisk …” in the upper left hand corner of the monitor. I assume the word clipped off is “Loading”, but it never does finish.

Recovery allows me to run the “fix broken packages” – then resume, and it boots just fine. Next boot, I have to repeat the grub recovery >fix broken pkgs>resume – so it doesn’t stick. Grub got upgraded to 2.12 somewhere (me) along the line. If the old kernel had still booted – I could have purged v6.8.38 – and just waited a bit and tried again after 24.04.1 was released in August, but v6.5.44 doesn’t work anymore. I’m afraid to do any more updates which may compound the mess. Any ideas to solve this?

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Hi, @jmarkus :slight_smile:

Regarding your Dell Optiplex 7010 machine - that you've upgraded from Ubuntu MATE 23.10 ("Mantic Minotaur") to Ubuntu MATE 24.04 LTS ("Noble Numbat") - and given that you mention that you can select between the Linux kernels 6.8.38 (actually, I believe that you mean 6.8.0-38 instead) and 6.5.44 (which I believe that you mean 6.5.0-44 instead), I assume that you can see the GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) screen to select between those two kernels. Am I right? If that's the case, I suggest that you do the following:

1 - In that GRUB boot loader, select the line of the kernel that is loaded by default (I'll assume it's the line of the 6.8.0-38 kernel) and press the e key to edit the kernel options for a single boot.

2 - In the editor screen that then appears, use the arrow keys to locate the end of the line that starts with "linux "

3 - In that line, delete the words quiet splash and then press the key combination CTRL + X to boot that kernel.

If that boot works well - instead of appearing the black screen / blank screen that you've mentioned - now is the time to make that GRUB change permanent. To do that, please edit the /etc/default/grub file with administrator privileges, by running the following command (that will open the "Pluma" text editor as superuser):

sudo pluma /etc/default/grub

In that /etc/default/grub file, change the following line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

... change that line so it becomes the following one instead:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

After doing that, please save and close the file, and then run the following command:

sudo update-grub

Now, please reboot the computer and see if that boot is then normal. Please reply later, in this same discussion topic, to tell us if this solved the issue for you.

I hope this helps :slight_smile:

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Ricardo,
That did the trick.

Thank you for taking the time to correct my messed up upgrade. This is the second time I have had to remove "quiet splash" in grub on this computer after an upgrade. I assumed since I hadn't edited the file it had remained unchanged. I really appreciate your help.
Jim

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