Hello,
I've been running Solus on a Dell XPS 13 for a few months and was really satisfied with it. However, two weeks ago, an update broke it and it had a hard time booting. For some reason, I had to press F12 during boot and go to the boot menu for it to boot properly. Also, it would only boot to tty and I had to manually switch to the graphical environment.
After an update, everything was fine again : it booted nicely.
But then, I've got another update yesterday. If I remember well, it was some desktop branding things. I updated, tried to reboot, and nothing. All I see is a black screen after the DELL splash screen. I can't access anything, no input works.
I don't think the problem is the hard drive : I'm currently running Fedora on it while waiting for a fix, and it works just fine, no boot problems.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance !

Can you access the TTY? Ctrl+alt+f2

  • Syn replied to this.

    Syn well then you have to choot in, run a full update and check for any broken packages

    • Syn replied to this.

        Girtablulu So, I tried that but it doesn't let me go all the way through.
        Here's what I get from trying the Legacy way on Solus' website. I get stuck at this point :
        root@solus /home/live # mount /dev/nvme0n1 /target
        mount: /target: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/nvme0n1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
        And with the UEFI way, this is where I get stuck :
        root@solus /home/live # mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /target/boot
        mount: /target/boot: mount point does not exist.

        Here's my fdisk output :
        Device Size Type
        /dev/nvme0n1p1 488.3M EFI System
        /dev/nvme0n1p2 3.7G Linux swap
        /dev/nvme0n1p3 234.3G Linux filesystem

            Girtablulu So apparently this looks like a kernel problem. When I choose alternative boot options during boot, I can boot from 4.20 kernel. I guess the new 5.0 kernel broke something...?

              Syn And with the UEFI way, this is where I get stuck :
              root@solus /home/live # mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /target/boot
              mount: /target/boot: mount point does not exist.

              Probably a stupid question but could you have missed a step before that (bold)?

              sudo su
              mkdir /target
              mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /target
              mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /target/boot

              Edit: Of course if it's a problem with a new kernel I guess maybe it won't matter. 🙁

              • Syn replied to this.

                  Louhy Same result, nothing helps. I can only boot to 4.20 kernel. 🙁 Waiting for today's update to see if it helps.

                      Syn mount /dev/nvme0n1 /target

                      You're trying to mount the whole drive, not the partition.

                      You want mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /target

                          Justin Indeed, my bad on that one ! Thank you.
                          So, apparently there's an issue with lvmetad?
                          root@solus / # sudo clr-boot-manager update
                          Generating grub configuration file ...
                          WARNING: Failed to connect to lvmetad. Falling back to device scanning.
                          I checked the packages, nothing is broken. Nothing is out of date, and I event tied reinstalling the Linux - current package, to no avail. It still won't boot unless I pick the 4.2 kernel.

                              Also having similar issue with solus not booting after update. I can press spacebar and select the older kernal and it boots fine. I also have a nvme drive.

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                              • Post #14

                              Girtablulu Yes, same problem here - NVMe and Nvidia hardware, Solus totally went blank recently.

                                Not sure if NVMe matters, but I did have problems booting with the open driver. (I have the latest Solus 4.0 on an NVidia laptop which I believe has an NVMe drive.)

                                Are these blank screen systems using the "nouveau" default driver? I guess that's built into kernel. If not and you can boot into the older kernel, I've had luck switching drivers via Doflicky.

                                • Syn replied to this.

                                  Louhy hmm my laptop doesn't have an Nvidia card, and nothing shows in Doflicky. I do remember, however, seeing Nvidia somewhere when I checked for package integrity. I don't know if that's relevant though.

                                  If other people with Nvme drives have the same problem however, it might be a good clue I guess.

                                    Ah. Also turns out this laptop has an M.2 drive, but it's SATA. So maybe nvme related...

                                    Syn lvmetad is a red-herring, you can ignore that warning. Edit: I need to know the exact version of the 4.20 and 5.0 kernels in order to help.

                                    • Syn replied to this.

                                        DataDrake the computer cannot boot with the 5.0.12-115.current.
                                        The kernel that works is 4.20.16-112.current.
                                        Thanks a lot !

                                            Syn Nothing is popping out at me kernel side, so I'm pretty sure you must have a broken package or something.

                                            • Syn replied to this.