Black screen blinking prompt during apt upgrade: what to do?

stravanasu@lemmy.ca to Linux@lemmy.ml – 4 points –

I just did an apt update followed by an apt upgrade, and during the latter the screen went all blank with a blinking prompt. Unresponsive to keyboard and touchpad. I also hear the fans. It's been like this for 10 min now. I think some Nvidia drivers were included in the upgrade. What to do? Is it safe to emergency reboot? I appreciate any suggestions also for post-checks. Cheers!

5

Try switching to virtual console (alt+ctrl+F<1-6>). If it does not work, reboot with alt+sysrq+REISUB (sysrq is the same key as prtsc, REISUB must be typed sequentially).

I ran into something similar on Linux Mint. Never seen my installation kill itself before until this. Ended up booting into Recovery mode from the grub menu, and rolled back using Timeshift restore.

For me, the culprit was the ubuntu-drivers-common update, because after I rolled back, I was able to install all the other updates without issue. I just blacklisted this one update to keep it from showing until the next version is released.