[SOLVED] black screen on boot - memtest freezes - soldered ram - i am hosed right?

[Rubin_Farr]

Hi guys. Just yesterday I installed 20.1 MATE on my ASUS K501UW-AB78 laptop. It was working great until today. Fortunately it's a backup machine and not my main.

Today when I selected LM 20.1 from Grub I get a black screen. If I fiddle with it long enough (e.g. switching to my old 18.1 LM install or booting from advanced options w/ the same kernel even) it will start sometimes but will ultimately black screen again on a subsequent restart.

I tried using the originally installed kernel and restoring a timeshift just to see if it had an effect. It did not. I also installed the Nvidia drivers which seemed to work ok but did not help the black screen from popping up again.

Because of how quirky and random this seemed I tried to Memtest it from GRUB. The Memtest freezes at 1 second in any mode I can find on there. It doesn't say fail but it's all frozen.

Did I miss anything or is this simply bad RAM? This RAM is soldered in and cannot be changed out as far as I know. This computer is basically hosed if I'm not mistaken. Am I mistaken?

Any recommendations on laptops (preferably without soldered RAM)?

It's a shame because the install was working great for a night. Thanks for any input.

[asinoro]

How it behaves from live USB?

[Rubin_Farr]

I can't seem to boot from the live USB now. I can get to the LM splash screen but when I select 'start linux mint' I get the black screen with the white blinking cursor on the top left and won't boot.

I was having this issue yesterday when I first tried to install so I tried a different thumb drive and it then worked. At the time I believed it just didn't like that one particular thumb drive. Now I think it is not the thumb drive's fault because now the "working" thumb drive is producing the same result. So this condition was most likely there before the install I'm guessing.

Anyway, if Memtest doesn't even get through two seconds, I think that's the bottom line.

One weird thing is that my 18.1 seems to boot ok but now it asks me for a password to the disk (I never had that before). Simply pressing enter seems to clear it and the boot continues normally.

[SMG]

I can't seem to boot from the live USB now. I can get to the LM splash screen but when I select 'start linux mint' I get the black screen with the white blinking cursor on the top left and won't boot.

Make sure you are plugged in to power when you are booting and not just running from battery. You have not provided any info about your system, but when LM20 first came out, there were a number of ASUS laptops which were doing the same thing yours is doing (booting to just blinking cursor) if booting using only battery power. I think those were mostly AMD processors, but I do not recall for sure.

Anyway, if Memtest doesn't even get through two seconds, I think that's the bottom line.

That is not a good sign, but based on your next comment about asking for a password to the disk, it's possible there might be a corruption problem with the hard drive.

[Rubin_Farr]

Turns out the intel microcode was causing the issues.