How do you get 16.04 to boot?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 1 Jul 2017 20:00:58 -0700, Pastor JW wrote:
>It does a hard drive check then goes to a dark grey screen which
>remains unchanging.

Hi,

always? Even after booting with "upstart"? If you boot again without
"upstart" after booting with "upstart", the check runs again?

Just in case run

sudo apt update
sudo apt install smartmontools

and follow this guide:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Troubleshooting#File_Issues

It's unlikely an X issue, but just in case also run

  grep EE /var/log/Xorg.0.log

The Wiki of another distro describes how to use "journalctl":
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd#Journal

It might be that Ubuntu's journalctl logs provide a different content,
than those Arch Wiki logs, but how to use the command is equal for all
distros.

More hints could be found here (but for the moment you could skip
reading those hints):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio/TroubleShooting#Ubuntu_troubleshooting

>nothing else comes on screen.  Yes the laptop screen is working.  The
>light on the keyboard comes on that says the wireless is turned on.
>However, the only way to get it to work is to hit the escape early, go
>to the advanced options and click on the the kernel choice that has
>"upstart" behind it, whatever that is, then it come with a ramdisk
>comment, then it brings up my login screen and and I can get online.
>I have to go through all these manual steps to make it work.

The ramdisk message likely is a bootloader message, just informing you
about what is done, it's much likely not an error message. You should
get the same message when not using "upstart".

"Upstart" "handles starting of tasks and services during boot" [1]. By
default 16.04 does not use "upstart". The default is "systemd". I'm
surprised that you could switch init systems.



"Switching init systems

If you are running Ubuntu vivid (15.04), you can easily switch between
upstart and systemd at will since both packages are installed at
present. As of March 9 2015, vivid was changed to use systemd by
default, before that upstart was the default.

Switch to upstart for a single boot

In grub, select "Advanced options for Ubuntu", where you will find an
"Ubuntu, with Linux ... (upstart)" entry. This will boot with
init=/sbin/upstart.

If you have upstart-sysv installed and thus boot with upstart by
default, there will be an "Ubuntu, with Linux ... (systemd)" entry,
which will boot with init=/lib/systemd/systemd.2"
- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers#Switching_init_systems





The same Ubuntu wiki gives hints how to do the troubleshooting:



"Debugging

Since this implies the service works under Upstart but is problematic
under systemd, details of both systems are provided to allow for some
comparison.

Boot Time

Common Setup

Remove the following from the kernel command-line via the grub menu:

    "quiet"

    "splash" 

Upstart

    Add "--debug to the kernel command-line via the grub menu.

    Optionally add "console=ttyS0 to the kernel command-line via the
    grub menu if you have a serial console. 

systemd

    Add "systemd.log_level=debug  to the kernel command-line via the
    grub menu. Optionally add one of the following too:

        "systemd.log_target=kmsg"

        "systemd.log_target=console" 

Starting a rescue shell

    Run:

           $ sudo systemctl enable debug-shell.service

    Reboot.
    If the system fails to boot, you can now switch to tty9
    (CTRL+ALT+F9) for a getty console login."
- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers#Debugging





On Sat, 1 Jul 2017 16:07:48 -0700, Pastor JW wrote:
>On 07/01/2017 02:16 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> sudo systemd-nspawn -qD /mount/point  
>That actually does give an error,  ... "systemd-nspawn: command not
>found".

If the live media should be 16.04, too, you could install it by running

sudo apt update
sudo apt install systemd-container

https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial-updates/systemd-container .

Regards,
Ralf

[1] http://upstart.ubuntu.com/