Blank screen, no GRUB

[Sparkles]

I installed Kubuntu (latest LTS 24.04 I believe) for the 6:th time and after doing apt upgrade and restarting it does not wanna boot but rather prompting me a blank screen. I read that you should hold right shift to get into grub and start recovery but holding right shift does not prompt grub. Holding F12 for boot select does not show grub either. I was thinking if there might be some way to run grub from USB and get into recovery? But I might be better of trying something else?

[Sparkles]

Im gonna try to chroot from try kubuntu on USB and try to regenerate the Grub

[Sparkles]

Did not help

[oshunluvr]

I'm not sure where you read that "right shift" does that, but it's not fully correct. If you are booting in "legacy" mode, holding shift (either afaik) will bring up the menu. If you are booting in EFI mode, the "ESC" key does it.

Additionally, "apt upgrade" is also not correct. They literally invented "pkcon" because too many people were breaking their installs by incorrect usage of "apt upgrade". From now on, I suggest using "apt full-upgrade" if upgrading from the command line, or "pkcon refresh" followed by "pkcon update" to prevent incomplete package upgrades.

To your issue...

Is GRUB booting or not? If it's not booting as you say, then no amount of keyboard mashing will help. If GRUB is actually booting, then the "black screen" issue has been reported and the resolution is to remove "quiet splash" from the linux boot line and/or updating packages (correctly) and rebooting.

Assuming GRUB is booting and you're getting a black unresponsive screen, I suggest these steps:

At the black screen, press "CTRL-ALT-F3" and log into the console. Then do

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

Then edit GRUB defaults and remove "quiet splash" and update GRUB, then reboot.
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Find this line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
and delete "quiet splash" so it looks like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

Then enter these commands:

sudo update-grub
reboot

Please post back with your results.

[claydoh]

Actually, pkcon is just the cli interface to PackageKit, nothing more. It definitely is not specific to Apt, as it works on any distro that uses Gnome Software or Plasma Discover. Which is most of them I have used it on Fedora just to see what it looks like. It has the same terminal artifacts as it does on KDE.

The KDE neon devs chose to push pkcon usage for the apt upgrade issue there. A stock *buntu (with no PPAs that would require package removals in order to upgrade thing) should update with apt upgrade just fine in modern times, since Debian changed how the commands work a number of years ago.

But full-upgrade won't hurt or break things

[TinyTim]

From now on, I suggest using "apt full-upgrade" if upgrading from the command line, or "pkcon refresh" followed by "pkcon update" to prevent incomplete package upgrades.

Does full upgrade also upgrade the kernel, and if so, is it possible that the kernel upgrade could break Nvidia and modules, making the machine inoperable?

[bainkowalski]

Had the same issue coming from 23.10 so before I upgraded, after trying twice using timeshift to restore to mantic minotaur lol, I changed grub, my line looks like GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet loglevel=3" removing splash, sudo update-grub and no more blank screen.
IDK if you have that option if its a fresh install or whatever but if you are upgrading change it beforehand remove splash.