[SOLVED] - Major Maui Meltdown.

[kdemeoz]

Hi rocky. Thanks & wow, that's an interesting discovery; how good are you!!  :-)  This morning i also tried researching the recovery boot option, but i certainly didn't discover this new info.  Here's what i've now got in my grub; am going to wait 5' in case you're still online & see this quickly, then i will do the reboot [without recovery]:

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset xforcevesa"

Fingers crossed! 

[kdemeoz]

Sadly, it made no difference... so i had to once again use the boot recovery option.

I really wish that the mysterious "2nd splash screen" [the one where the normal boot now freezes, & which never used to appear before this weird problem], the one i described in my initial post as the one with the 2 horizontal blue bars, did not lose the white-font text that appears in it for less than 1/2 a second [every single boot this text vanishes before i can read it]. For all i know whatever this text says might be important for troubleshooting. Why does it vanish?

I'll wait for leszek's answers to the questions i asked in my recent post reply.

[leszek]

Would no NVidia driver in-use = no Plasma Desktop Effects?

No the nouveau driver should be able to provide OpenGL support.

To remove the nvidia driver use the driver manager to choose nouveau.


P.S.: Ok new idea. Before you try anything with the nividia -> nouveau thing try first switching the plymouth theme to something else. I guess the non readable text might be an issue of the default plymouth theme (having the colors set wrongly or problems on setting them with nvidia-kms).
So please run

Code:

sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth

in a terminal. It should allow you switching the default theme to spinner.plymouth at least. (by default the only other option)
Try doing that.
After that it is important to update the initramfs for the changes to also land in initrd.
So run [code]sudo update-initramfs -u[/b] aswell.

After that try restarting with a normal boot. You should see another bootsplash and hopefully some error message whith which we can analyze whats going wrong on your machine all the sudden.

[kdemeoz]

NB -- I acted on your original post of 1 hr ago, & posted the results below based on that, only to then see you edited your post 30' ago -- rats. I am now exhausted & stressed out, so will have to leave your new idea [thanks for it] til tomorrow.
===================================================================

I selected Nouveau instead of current Nvidia 367.57, edited & updated grub line to be:

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

, rebooted [accepting default 47 kernel & normal boot], observed nice high-res full-screen splash-screen, but then that same flash of text came & vanished again, then the blue splash-screen flickered into a black emergency boot screen. I retried a few times, but it always happened.

I had to again use the recovery boot fsck option, but the subsequent plasma login screen, & the desktop session afterwards, were a lousy low-res 1024x768 [or something similar] & i couldn't increase it to my normal 1920x1080. Because the Nouveau driver did NOT fix the normal-boot problem, AND then also gave an additional problem of low-res, i saw no reason to keep using it, so i changed back to my previous Nvidia driver, re-edited grub to:

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

, rebooted [accepting default 47 kernel & the recovery boot fsck option], logged back in, & plasmashell seems all good again... but i repeat, this is still NOT with a normal boot. 

This ongoing stress feels like it should be giving me a stomach ulcer! Unless anyone has any great new ideas, i think i have to give up, & just accept this weird recent bug is unsolvable, & that from now on i must always use the recovery boot fsck option.   

[rocky7x]

leszek: if booting the normal way doesn't do anything, just hangs immediately, from my perspective it would mean that the grub option for normal boot is screwed somehow. Maybe the text that vanishes just says something about grub not managing to mount the root partition or something similar. Maybe /etc/fstab has some weird option in the mount flags. What do you think?

kdemeoz: can you please attach the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file to this thread (or paste the whole content if not able to attach, but the file is big) and paste the content of /etc/fstab file. Also maybe you could attach the /var/log/syslog and /var/log/syslog.1 (of course, please zip them first).

[leszek]

There is no syslog in systemd anymore. It should be journalctl but that what he tried already and didn't get a log which is strange aswell.

For grub messed up I don't think so. /etc/fstab broken would not explain why it is booting in recovery

[kdemeoz]

She, not he.

Thank you both, i'll try all these things tomorrow [23:10 here now in Oz].

[rocky7x]

There is no syslog in systemd anymore. It should be journalctl but that what he tried already and didn't get a log which is strange aswell.

For grub messed up I don't think so. /etc/fstab broken would not explain why it is booting in recovery

But then how come I have syslog on my Maui? And it contains valid log data...

[leszek]

Interesting maybe syslog is still active then.

[rocky7x]

Seems so, since I have it logging everything on both my laptops...

kdemeoz: can you therefore please try to attached zipped syslog and syslog.1?