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Just got a new laptop this week, the Motile M141 (using Ryzen 3 3200U). And got my NVMe Drive and RAM upgrade today. After getting the hardware installed into the system I attempted Ubuntu 19.10 install. I was able to boot into the live disk just fine and installed Ubuntu with no issues. same process I have done hundreds of times on other systems.

After I finished install and reboot I get to GRUB and then select Ubuntu, but then my system hangs and I get a black screen.

I have tried the 'nomodeset' option in the grub menu and that only sends me to a screen with a blinking cursor and the system still hangs. No other text will appear on the screen. Has anyone had an issue like that or could give me some hints. All I can seem to find on the forums are 'nomodeset' fixes, or they cant even boot the live disk image. Or how installing Nvidia drivers fix the issue.

I have tried reinstalling Ubuntu about 3 times so far. The first time installing I selected to use hard drive encryption and install 3rd party driver, the next time I did not use encryption, and the third time I un-selected 3rd party drivers

As far as information on the BIOS. The system is very bare bones and I have very limited access into the BIOS. I have disabled secure boot, but I have no UEFI options other than to turn on Legacy OS. Legacy OS cant see my SSDs for some reason.

I'm installing Windows (from a rescue disk) on my new SSD to ensure that it isnt a hardware issue.

Carrot
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    Have you updated UEFI. AMD released new UEFI last summer, but vendors did not update for months. Update was for 19.10 or later. Even new system may need UEFI update. Almost all SSD also need firmware update. – oldfred Mar 08 '20 at 15:52
  • I'll give it a try. There have been some issues with the BIOS update. But I did find a 'safe' way of doing it through windows so I will try that once my system has recovered windows. That being said, there have been some issues with the BIOS update bricking this type of laptop. And numerous posts on the Motile forums have installed Ubuntu 19.10 without the BIOS update which leads me to believe that it is not the direct issue. – Carrot Mar 08 '20 at 16:06
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    Boot to a Ubuntu Live DVD/USB and open a terminal and sudo dmidecode -s bios-version and then go to the Motile web site and see if there's a newer version. Also... Go to https://www.memtest86.com/ and download/run their free memtest to test your memory. Get at least one complete pass of all the 4/4 tests to confirm good memory. This may take many hours to complete. Start comments to me with @heynnema or I may miss them. – heynnema Mar 08 '20 at 16:26
  • @heynnema I have updated the BIOS successfully. And I passed the memtest with 0 errors. I have deduced a problem. After trying 19.10 and 18.04 a few more times with different variables I found that it is an update that is killing the system. I was able to install with no issues but as soon as I ran an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and restarted the system borked. With the amount of packages that were installed I have no idea how to deduce what the actual issue is and what is breaking the system. – Carrot Mar 09 '20 at 14:53
  • Good job! Updates in 18.04 or 19.10? Are you able to get to the GRUB menu and select an older kernel to boot? – heynnema Mar 09 '20 at 15:03
  • @heynnema Just tried starting with an older Kernel, and that worked.... went straight into the GUI desktop. I will have to just set it to automatically start from the older Kernel. thanks for the advice! – Carrot Mar 09 '20 at 15:20
  • Edit your question and show me ls -al /boot. Are you on 19.10 right now? – heynnema Mar 09 '20 at 15:39
  • What version BIOS did you update from/to? What version kernel did you boot to? I'm still waiting to see ls -al /boot. Please advise. – heynnema Mar 09 '20 at 20:51
  • Status please... – heynnema Mar 10 '20 at 15:21
  • @heynnema i am currently on 18.04. It is working on the older kernel (5.3.0-28-generic) I went into Ubuntu and deleted the newer kernels that were causing error so now I only boot with the stable kernel. I am on BIOS 1.06. – Carrot Mar 10 '20 at 21:48
  • @Carrot It would be instructive to install 19.04 or 19.10, without updates, retest, then do updates, retest, and see where/if it breaks. I suspect it may be the -40 kernel. Otherwise you'll be forever tied to 18.04 – heynnema Mar 10 '20 at 22:36
  • @heynnema I will try that when I get some time this week. I've also been looking at mint as well but realistically it should be about the same since they base everything on Ubuntu. I will update my post when I can provide more info. Thanks for all the help! – Carrot Mar 11 '20 at 01:26

2 Answers2

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From the comments...

  • we successfully updated the BIOS to 1.06
  • we ran memtest on newly installed memory
  • we booted successfully to an older 5.3.0-28-generic kernel in 18.04
heynnema
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You could give it a try with the same solution in my problem where you contacted me.

  1. Recovery Mode (in my case it'ss under Advanced Option in the GRUB
    menu)
  2. Root prompt
  3. Run su - yourusername to log in via
  4. Then startx .

If this lets you in your desktop then launching Software Update could be useful to install additional packages for you model, maybe even following @heynnema's comment.

But consider that despite the similarities our problems could be very different. Hope that could be of any help

tebkanlo
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