Ubuntu – Cannot Boot After 15.10 Upgrade [AMD graphics driver problems]

15.10bootfsck

I'm in desperation mode. I upgraded to 15.10 last night, via sudo do-release-upgrade. I did nothing else at the time. It passed without incident.

Then it asked to restart. I pressed Enter. It rebooted, went to the Ubuntu load screen, and hangs.

I pressed Ctrl+Meta+F2 to view the command line. It says…

fsck from util-linux 2.26.2
/dev/sda1: recovering journal
/dev/sda1: clean, 995697/3871592 files, 52624527/154846720 blocks

…and stays there forever. I can get to recovery mode, but none of the options help (I ran them all). I can get to root terminal, but I don't know what to do from there.

I have backups, but I also don't want to spend a week setting up my system all over again.

How do I fix this?

Best Answer

This turned out to be related to Bug #1493888. I use fglrx as my graphics driver, and according to the offical Changelog for Wily Werewolf, that is not compatible at this time.

There are workarounds in the comments of the bug on Launchpad, but it did not work for me personally. I will be downgrading for the time being.

UPDATE: I'm now working just fine on Ubuntu 15.10. Apparently, fglrx will not be supported in Ubuntu 16.04, so moving away from that proprietary driver is ideal if at all possible.

WARNING: Before you start in on all this jazz, make sure your graphics card actually is supported by xserver-xorg-video-ati. To find your graphics card model, run...

$ lspci -nn | grep VGA

Your model is towards the end of the line. Then, check the list on the official Ubuntu wiki for your model. You may need to ignore the letter at the end of the model; mine was a Radeon HD 6520G, but I had to search the page for only 6520.

The lack of screen resolution options on the open source xserver-xorg-video-ati driver stems from the fact that, if fglrx is present on the system at all, it will massively interfere with xserver-xorg-video-ati.

If anyone else hits this problem, you can purge fglrx from TTY or recovery mode root. Then, reinstall the open-source drivers.

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx*
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver xorg-core
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Reboot your computer, and you'll find that the problem has resolved.

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