(K)ubuntu 9.10 won't boot after recent kernel update

[Tom Pringle]

after updating my system on Sunday 6 December which included a kernel update the system no longer boots. The boot process proceeds just past the (K)ubuntu loading status bar screen but fails to make it far enough to show the login screen. The systme apparently hangs?

There is at least one thread with several other users who have also encountered this problem on various systems.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347951

My system consists of a recent AMD quadcore with AMD790 chipset. I can provide more details as needed.

[Tom Pringle (thomas-b-pringle)]

adding another thread that sprouted...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347787

[Kaaahn! (cnetrix)]

Seems to be affecting me too... I'm using Kubuntu 9.10, after the white usplash logo the screen goes black and freezes. The system is unresponsive. When I press the power button a blue rectangle appears on my screen (looks like a blue xterm window when I xinit from a tty) before it powers off. I need to restart several times before it will book into KDE.

[Tom Pringle (thomas-b-pringle)]

what does the tag "kernel-series-unknown" imply? Isn't the kernel series very clear. All of the people reporting this very serious problem are running ubuntu 9.10 with the very latest kernel release so that would mean 2.6.31-16..... Right?

[Kaaahn! (cnetrix)]

This is affecting me on 2.6.31-16-generic.

[Leroy Wolins (wolinsleroy)]

Me too. I use the 64 bit version of 9.10. The chip is an AMD dual core. The first two mornings I was able to get updates by invoking the trouble shooting version of 9.10 and selecting "repair packages." I got downloads the first time, but the second time it seemed that packages were deleted. This morning, no packages were repaired or deleted, but a small download was made. Again, I was able to boot.

[Tom Pringle (thomas-b-pringle)]

I resolved the problem on my system by configuring grub to boot 2.6.31-15-generic.

[Joseph Radtke (joeradtke)]

I have sortof resolved the problem by booting in recovery mode every time, selecting the repair broken packages option and ultimately getting it rebooted in a command line mode, then logging in and using sudo gdm to get a graphic interface. This works but is very unwieldy. I hope this bug is going to be fixed at some point. I am not anxious to go back to 2.6.31-15 as this defeats the purpose of getting the updates.

[Tom Pringle (thomas-b-pringle)]

Based on my experience with bug reports on Launchpad, I tend to doubt anyone is going to look at this without more information. I have the impression that everyone has switched over to to working on the next release (Lucid Lynx) and that the solution will be to upgrade to 10.04. For 9.10, I modified my boot configuration so that it would automatically boot from -15. If you need the details on how to do that I can provide them in a later post.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Tom,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 493733

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

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

[Tom Pringle (thomas-b-pringle)]

this problem was resolved in a later update. I'm now running with a fully updated machine and do not see this issue.