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Yesterday my desktop stopped booting to either windows 10 or ubuntu 20.04. It gets to the grub screen where I can select either and continue but will only show black screen after.

  • Last thing windows did before the issue was install an update. So following advice from this site I rolled back that update, but didn't help.
  • I tried booting from usb to live cd ubuntu which works (some of the times) and used boot-repair to fix it. Generated this report
    • It mentions in line 10 a full shutdown and then reboot - as opposed to a reset - so did that. Managed to boot into windows without a problem. Shutdown the computer from menu - waited a couple of secs - and started computer again. Same problem. Managed to boot into windows and ubuntu in similar fashion twice more of 2 dozen attempts, but not consistently.
    • It also mentions in line 130: => Windows 7/8/2012 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc. I had windows 8 installed but uninstalled and installed windows 10 about 2 weeks ago. Don't know if that had anything to do with.
  • It sometimes mentions "initramfs unpacking failed: decoding failed" while booting, but that seems unrelated and I wasn't able to fix it from a live usb ubuntu with these instructions.

Don't see any way forward now. Hope anyone can give me some pointers forward. Would be much appreciated!

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    initramfs unpacking failed: decoding failed ← this is certainly not unrelated. Initramfs is the second most important file in a Linux system. You can't boot without it.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Dec 3, 2020 at 8:06
  • Alright. Would that also explain why I can't boot into windows either? I looked at it a bit more and seems a journalctl dump could give more info. I can't make sense of it, but maybe someone here can? output from journalctl -p err -b
    – Sander Schepens
    Commented Dec 3, 2020 at 11:09
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    Were you able to get into the advanced startup screen - the blue one from the article you've linked?
    – gronostaj
    Commented Dec 3, 2020 at 11:22
  • Yes sometimes. After enough reboots. Thats how I removed the last windows update. Didn't help though. Could it have something to do with my graphics card dying? symptoms as described in this reddit comment are very similar and I started seeing glitches in screen during last week or so.
    – Sander Schepens
    Commented Dec 3, 2020 at 11:27
  • Okay, I feel stupid. I changed monitor recently before the problem started. Switched temporarily back and the problem was gone. Seems it was unrelated to any of the other things mentioned above. What is best practice here? Give answer myself below?
    – Sander Schepens
    Commented Dec 11, 2020 at 7:06

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Seems the problem was unrelated to any of the above. I had changed monitors recently before the issue started. Changing back to the old fixed the problem. Seems all the other symptoms were unrelated.

I suspect it is a compatibility issue between my graphic cards (2x Geforce GTX 660 in SLI) and the monitor (Iiyama G-Master GB3266QSU-B1). Haven't been able to find any evidence for this anywhere though. If anybody knows more, let me know. Considering buying a different graphic card now - since it was quite old anyway.

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