1

I've spent most of today trying to find out why my computer wouldn't pass the bios splash screen. It took a few hours to get the computer running again. I tried all manner of hardware and software configurations in my ubuntu pc and checked voltages on all the psu cables (all were w/in spec). It turned out that I needed to boot in legacy mode and then uninstall and reinstall the desktop gui program and reinstall my nvidia drivers to get it working. Now the computer is working, but it is slightly different than before.

After the fix, my bios splash screen is different. I used to have this one: enter image description here

Now I have this one:

enter image description here

Also, I have to boot in legacy mode now instead of EFI. I never changed any bios settings on this pc, so either it was always set to legacy and something switched it to efi, or it was always efi and something broke and now I have to use legacy. I don't know the difference between these two, but I don't think it is relevant to this discussion so I haven't taken the time to read up.

What happened was, yesterday before bed I installed some software, then fell asleep, and when I went to use the pc this morning it was off. I usually leave it on, but my last electricty bill was high so recently I sometimes turn it off. So I don't know if something happened to the pc to and it shut itself down, or if I had shut it down before falling asleep. The really weird bit is that this is a bios issue and I feel like no reasonable software installation process in the OS should have touched the BIOS.

I think this is very weird behavior! I don't know about the different boot modes, but I wonder if it is possible that some bit of hardware has fried that is causing me to have to use legacy? And I don't know where the splash screen is stored but maybe some bit flipped somewhere and caused it to use screen b instead of a? What is going on?!

Improve this question
6
  • 1
    You sure you didn't run the "Flash Bios" option, and update the firmware via the Web? Gigabyte have a tool that automatically does this on Windows...not sure about Ubuntu.
    – DankyNanky
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 6:43
  • Definitely didn't do that. I installed some software with the ubuntu package manager. I would be very shocked if a library installation flashed your bios. I've spent so many hours now working on this issue, I just want an answer... I guess I'm going to look in the guts of the package manager tomorrow to see what it does. Thanks for the tip!
    – Julian Cienfuegos
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 6:52
  • 3
    potentially also in changing from EFI to Legacy, you've disabled fast boot and enabled logo splash on boot; check that out and see.
    – DankyNanky
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 7:03
  • 1
    Is this a systemd-based system? If so, you could get logs from previous boots from journalctl -bN where N is the number of boots back you want to go in time, this is given your journald was configured to store them (for more info see: askubuntu.com/a/774309/638782 ). dmesg would also typically contain some useful info. Finally see answers here for what apt-get or dpkg might have done to your computer: askubuntu.com/q/425809/638782 .
    – wvxvw
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 11:14
  • So journalctl -bN says "No persistent journal was found". dmesg gives alot of output and I'm not sure right now what it all means. I do see systemd in journalctl, but I don't know what that is or what it means for systemd to be the basis of a system. I've already looked through my apt logs. I guess I've got a few days + of reading up ahead of me to figure out what the heck happened! I guess it's also time to order a new pc just in case there is some big problem with this pc that I don't understand yet. Thanks for giving me an idea where to start.
    – Julian Cienfuegos
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 22:22

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .