Ubuntu – Ubuntu boots to a black screen with a blinking cursor after upgrading from 14.04 to 15.10

bootupgrade

I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu 14.04 using the Software Updater. The update seemed to be progressing normally except it skipped the upgrade to 14.10 and was upgrading to 15.10 instead of 14.10. When I returned from lunch there was a black screen with a small, blinking white underline character in the top left corner, and I couldn't start the GUI desktop environment.

My system has 2 hard disks: a 458GB Sandisk SSD and a 120GB Crucial SSD. If I boot to the Sandisk SSD I get the result described above. If I boot to the Crucial SSD I get a brief purple screen as in Ubuntu, then just a black screen with a very small stationary white underline character in the top left corner. If I now press Ctrl+Alt+Delete I get a brief flash of a purple screen with the word ubuntu in large white letters, then the black screen with the white underline character returns, but I still can't get to a GUI desktop environment.

Best Answer

This seems to be a similar issue found here:

No GUI after upgrade to Ubuntu 15.10

Commands provided in link:

sudo apt-get purge nvidea*
sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
sudo apt-get install nouveau-firmware
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg
sudo shutdown -r now

Reinstalling the drivers may help. The link provided has you remove nvidia drivers as well, which have caused issues before when upgraded. However the rest of the commands also provide commands to remove and reinstall all the other display drivers as well.

Hope that helps!

Related Question