Ubuntu 24.04 (Pentium N3530) Won't Boot

Hullo folks,
So currently reconditioning a relatively old laptop for family use. It did previously have Ubuntu 20.04 on it which worked fine. No issues. Installed fine etc.

It's got one of the actually-an-Atom Pentiums in it (N3530). 4GB DDR3 RAM. The package on the whole is a Toshiba Satelite-C50-B131.

Install here was a bit of an issue (if this is relevant). UEFI install didn't work with an ambiguous error message that I didn't particularly feel like diagnosing (saying words to the effect of "we don't know what went wrong", the log each time seemed to show that it had something to do with installing GRUB), so switched the BIOS back to compatibility mode and from that point it installed fine.

However, the system now won't boot. It simply hangs on the grey screen that you find yourself in between the Grub menu disappearing (when it's set to appear) and the splash screen showing up.

However, if you then force it to power off and start it again, this time it does work. Albeit with Plymouth running in text mode. All is good. No issues. Of course if I shut down again the issue repeats, needing a reset mid-boot/a failed boot, and then for the process that Ubuntu seems to go through if a boot failed (ie. bring up the Grub menu, drop to text mode) to happen to then allow it to boot.

I've tried variations of:

  • Removing "quiet" and "splash" from the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameters.
  • Adding "nomodeset" to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameters
  • All possible variants of the above in combination
  • Tried adding "plymouth.enable=0 disablehooks=plymouth"
  • Forcing the GRUB menu to display rather than skipping this step as it does by default.

To no success (although these do change the boot behaviour when it goes through the process after it failed to boot last time, so the commands are going through). The Grub menu does show up when using that, but unless it failed to boot last time around, it'll go to grey with no further progress.

The log is not particularly helpful here as it just seems to give up at a random place and do nothing further without actually logging what the issue is.

My thought on how to fix it most simply is to essentially force the boot process to always follow the process it would if it failed to boot the previous time (although no idea what configuration parameters I'd need to use here). Other ideas are also welcome.

All help appreciated :slight_smile:

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Hi, @InfamousJazzersizer and welcome to the Ubuntu MATE Community!

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Hi Matthew,

I have two Laptops with almost the same specs:

  1. CPU N4500 + RAM 4GB + SSD 128GB
  2. CPU N6000 + RAM 8GB + SSD 128GB
    Both are Acer Swift One, the second obviously newer than the first.

Although Ubuntu-MATE is very good, the installer Ubuntu switched to after 22.04 is, to use an understatement, an embarrassment.

If you are interested in some of the shenenigans of the quite underwhelming results of this insult of an installer, you might want to read this post

  1. If you laptop is UEFI capable, chances are high that it won't boot (the installer) at all in legacy/compatibility mode. Keep it in UEFI mode.

  2. The installer can hang, crash, refuse to install GRUB, completely ignore or trash language settings. All thanks to the ludicrous designdecision to implement the installer in flutter (including runtime) running from a snap, starting things in parallel without so much of a thought about raceconditions. In short, it lacks robustness.

The most robust way to install UM 24.04 LTS is to install UM 22.04 LTS and from there upgrading to 24.04 LTS.

6 Likes

Thanks for the advice. On it I tried to drop down to 22.04. I still couldn't quite get it to work (UEFI failed to install GRUB, Legacy had the same boot issues). As I needed to hand the laptop off to family I switched back to 20.04 and left it there with Pro enabled to give it that extra support window.

I would perhaps have experimented more if I had more time, but seems that there was some regression (potentially) somewhere in the mix between 20.04.1 (which is what I installed as I already had the image on a stick, I kept the .1 version's kernel/stack and didn't upgrade to the latest HWE - 10 year old hardware shouldn't need it) and 22.04(.5).

I will admit the Flutter installer did feel quite jarring. I am reluctant to use that when I next upgrade my own machines if it does seem to be a common problem. I do usually prefer to install from fresh - historic "trauma" so to speak when an upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10 didn't go well put me off (probably a lot more stable LTS to LTS like). That or I'll just be sticking on 22.04 (which is what my own hardware is at) for a longer period. Snap is vexing, I will say and do not really like how it seems to be being pushed so hard - Firefox as a snap was something that jarred me in 22.04 and was something I quickly reversed.

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I have thought of an alternative way of installing:

  1. install ubuntu-server
  2. sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment

Theoretically it should end up exactly the same as a regular install though I never tested it.

1 Like