New installation not booting - blackscreen

[dalolo]

Merry Christmas erveryone!

I am new here and also quite new to Linux overall - i hope someone can help me as I am slowly running out of options due to my limited knowledge...

My situation:

• I have a 7 year old notebook, so far running Windows 7 but due  to ending support in Jan I wanted to look into alternatives and found Linux Lite
  
• The notebook is old but the time I bought it it was quite a decent machine with an Intel Core I5 processor, 8GB RAM, 32GB SSD and 750GB HDD. So it should be a good fit for Linux Lite. See attached SysReport for details.
  
• Booting Live from a USB drive works like a charm!
  
• I wanted to utilize my SSD for fast booting so the idea was: 32GB SSD (complete sda) for / as EXT4; first 16GB of HDD for SWAP; rest 734GB for /home as EXT4
  
• Installation went through just fine but when I reboot and try to boot from sda where the MBR was written, I just get a black screen and within 3 minutes the machine heats up like hell - it won't start up.
  

What I tried so far:

• I thought maybe there's a problem with graphics drivers I chose to be downloaded during installation as they are not available during live boot - so I tried installing without them same behaviour
  
• I thought maybe there's some problem with my SSD - thus I tried just using the 750GB hard drive, defining my two partitions plus SWAP there and create MBR/boot from there same behaviour
  
• I thought maybe my whole idea of partitions and mount points was wrong - so in addition to the try before I let the Linux Lite Installer manage the 750GB HDD - looks like it would only create one partition for / still same behaviour
  
• I thought maybe there's a problem with compatibility to xfce (though that doesn't make much sense, live boot worked - you see I run out of ideas and need your help  :-\ ). Still I tried the same with Bodhi Linux which works with Moksha desktop also same behaviour.
  

Does anyone have a hint for me what I could try next? Any help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

[Valtam]

First, there is no need to allocate a swap file anymore, it is built into the filesystem now, so get rid of that. What other options are you choosing during install, LVM, Encryption etc?

[dalolo]

First, there is no need to allocate a swap file anymore, it is built into the filesystem now, so get rid of that. What other options are you choosing during install, LVM, Encryption etc?

Hi Jerry, thanks for your reply!

Good to know about swap - my limited knowledge is from almost 20 years ago during my studies .
One argument for a separate swap space would be that I don't want too many write operations on my SSD but I think I'll drop that SSD for faster boot idea anyway - would have had some beauty in it but let's keep it simple.

Options during install:

• No encryption (as that feels like it would make my system somewhat fragile - maybe not justified and just from my old Floppy Disk days)
  
• No LVM (also for simplicity and stability - I don't see much use in my setup apart from maybe Volume snapshots?)
  
• Download additional drivers during setup yes (thought that might be a problem but I also tried installing without with same behaviour as said.
  
• Download updates during setup yes
  
• Partition tables as described
  

I think that's about it - the installation wizard doesn't give more options apart from keyboard layout and location.

What do you think about me doing another new installation as simply as possible and going forward from there? No SSD; Just a 70GB Root and Rest Home partition on the HDD and boot from there; No additional drivers; No updates during installation; no LVM/encryption.

Is there a possibility to get my installed system boot into some secure mode or command line interface for further analysis?

[Valtam]

Hold down Shift key when PC boots, that'll get you to Grub. The choose Advanced, Recovery, then boot as Normal, see what that does. Keep a close eye on the scrolling text.

[dalolo]

Hold down Shift key when PC boots, that'll get you to Grub. The choose Advanced, Recovery, then boot as Normal, see what that does. Keep a close eye on the scrolling text.

Thanks Jerry! Though holding shift shows me 'Loading Grub.' just for a split second before it goes into a black screen again... Any idea from there?

[dalolo]

Hi everyone, after a lot of googling, trying and analyzing with my live USB drive I got somewhat frustrated and decided to go with another non-Ubuntu distribution which works fine with my setup.
As said earlier, with Bodhi Linux (which is also an Ubuntu flavor) I had the same behaviour, there seems to be some kind of incompatibility between my hardware and the Ubuntu Kernel. As I can't even get into GRUB and there are also no logs written, I can't analyze that any further. I don't think that debugging the Kernel is the way to go here - would be possible but my abilities+time are too limited for that.
Jerry, thanks again for looking into my problem and for the hints!

[TheDead]

Hi,

When it goes to the blackscreen, do you have a white cursor blinking in the top left?
i.e. a white blicking, "_"

Also, I notice it's a notebook so it could be that the display is being sent to the external connector(s)... not always the OS'se fault since I had this on different platforms.

[dalolo]

Hi,

When it goes to the blackscreen, do you have a white cursor blinking in the top left?
i.e. a white blicking, "_"

Also, I notice it's a notebook so it could be that the display is being sent to the external connector(s)... not always the OS'se fault since I had this on different platforms.

Hi TheDead,
thanks for your input - I gave up on LinuxLite or any other Ubuntu based distro now and have another distribution installed and running nicely so I can't try anything out anymore. I won't put any more time into it now but thanks anyway!

Though I can tell you that there was no cursor - just a pitch black screen...
And the system seemed to be caught in some kind of loop - as it was heating up like hell until I relieved it from its misery with a hard shut down (holding the power key did already hurt somewhat due to the heat ).

When trying to get into grub I just got "GRUB loading." for a split second and then again a black screen without anything - but then without heating up that much.

I tried to find something out by booting with my live USB stick and accessing the installed system's logs but I just found empty files there...