Stuck on boot, on 'loading initial ramdisk' or dropped to busybox

Question

I'm dual booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 on an MSI GT72S. Of the kernels I have installed, I can only ever boot with 4.4.0-36, that too usually after a couple of tries. Anything more recent than that just gets stuck on boot, either at "Loading initial ramdisk" when selected from 'Advanced options' in the grub menu, or drops me to a 'busybox' prompt after a minute or so when selected as the default newest kernel.

I don't know if this is relevant, but I needed to add intel_idle.max_cstate=0 to grub to get anything usable at all.

How do I diagnose what is going wrong and fix it?

Answer 1

Not entirely sure this was the same problem I had but my problem was related to this issue with LVM2/LUKS. The solution was to set

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

in /etc/default/grub, then run

sudo update-grub

Answer 2

Try restarting your computer from the Windows menu rather than shutting down, then booting straight into Linux.

After booting into Windows (10) then shutting down, I was getting this error. I saw elsewhere that some people were having issues with CMOS at this same time. I was starting to think it might have something to do with time (Windows and Linux seem to handle time differently).

My intent was to go into Windows and manually adjust the time, but it was already correct. I then restarted the computer from the Windows menu and Xubuntu started up normally.

Answer 3

Went to the recovery mode of Ubuntu kernel by pressing F12 and there I chose upgrade packages, if it did not work as it seemed it did not find my internet connection. So I continued starting into a recovery mode startup, there I run sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade, restarted and it worked.

Answer 4

I was able to boot into recovery mode, and in the driver menu switch off the nvidia driver and back onto it. I think it doesn't update correctly with Linux kernel updates