16.04 would not boot after installation

[Janos G. Komaromi]

This was a question but no answer or comments so I converted it to a bug report - jankom

This is a "mature" 32 bit machine. Had 12.04, then distro upgraded to 14.04, and recently distro upgraded to 16.04. After that it did not boot, so I decided to rebuild the machine with a virgin installation (reformat, etc.) Installation completed successfully, but after that the machine would not boot into the new installation. Grub is there, boot process starts, even gets to the stage when the x-server starts, but then it falls back to VGA mode (screen shows fsck result being OK) and continues to start x-server, and so on and on, repeating this loop.

Note (1): I can start 16.04 from the CD tray Ubuntu mode. If I look at syslog and xserver.0.log from the mounted 16.04 root filesystem (the one that would not boot) I can see no obvious reason for this behavior of getting stuck in a loop at boot process, although I have limited expertise in Ubuntu architecture.

Note (2): Rescue mode does not help either

Note (3): again, this is a 32 bit desktop machine with Athlon Duron CPU and nvidia chipsets. The machine has been running well with 12.04 or 14.04 (except for a still outstanding scanner bug on 14.04, but I don't think it has anything to do with this failure to boot on a shiny new 16.04 installation.

Note (4): I checked, I have plenty of free disk-space, and if I dual boot into my old Fedora-3 installation everything is fine. Therefore I do not think the problem would be hardware failure.

Note (5): finally (if it helps) the display is a 24" LCD. Booting from the 16.04 CD in live session mode the resolution is 1920x1080, and everything is fine. Just booting into the installed 16.04 on the hard disk fails with an endless loop between text and graphics mode.

[Janos G. Komaromi (jankom)]

"This bug affects you" - well, I'm "you" on another similarly older desktop machine with the same behavior. So it really affects not only "you" but "others" as well.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1631794/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Janos G. Komaromi (jankom)]

Update: System finally did boot - accidentally. I use this box rarely to boot Ubuntu, most of the time I boot into an old fedora-3. Just for info, and if it helps anybody, including the developers, I think the problem is related to system motherboard in power up state. If I completely cut power to the computer (pull the plug and remove Ethernet cable - I realize, cmos battery is still there, so strictly speaking this is not completely dead) then my computer did boot into 16.04.
It looks like using reboot option from fedora-3, or even using a dual boot feature prevents 16.04 to complete the boot process and enter into the loop described above.
I don't know if this is normal behavior, but I thought I'd bring this into the attention of anybody who reads this - and maybe help somebody with the same problem.
As far as I'm concerned I would close this bug but don't know how.
Janos

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Further to comment #3 I'm closing this bug report by changing the status to "Invalid". I'm sorry it took over four years for someone to read your comments.

[Janos G. Komaromi (jankom)]

That's OK. Thank you for your attention. This is mute anyway. That
particular, ancient, computer functions well with Red Hat version of
linux.
--
Janos G. Komaromi sent it
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https://jgklinux.jankom.net/

On Sat, 2021-06-12 at 13:58 +0000, Paul White wrote:
> Further to comment #3 I'm closing this bug report by changing the
> status
> to "Invalid". I'm sorry it took over four years for someone to read
> your
> comments.
>
>
> ** Changed in: ubuntu
> Status: New => Invalid
>