Dtyjlui

My Optiplex 990 with ubuntu server 16.04.3 won't boot. I'm left with a flashing cursor in the top left. I have run into the spectre kernel issue with Kernel panic after update to 4.4.0-108-generic

I have tried following How to get to the GRUB menu at boot-time? to get into grub, but no amount of tapping / holding shift (or escape as listed elsewhere) has got me into grub.

I tried a live cd and ran boot-repair (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair) and that succeeded in running but fixed nothing.

Any other ideas?

The top answer to the question you linked to explains how to get into the GRUB menu if pressing shift does not work. You just edit the file /etc/default/grub and comment out GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=[some number]. Then you run sudo update-grub.

Since you can't boot at all, you can't do that so easily.

However, you can do it from a live system, so go ahead and boot from a live system as you did before.

Now you can set up a chroot. If you're not sure of the device label of your installation's root partition, try running sudo fdisk -l to identify it. You should see something in the output like

/dev/sda2 <numbers indicating size> Linux filesystem

Try mounting that partition:

sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt

where sdXY is the correct label. Then have a look to see if the mounted partition has the directories you expect to see in your root partition:

ls /mnt

If you see things like this (not necessarily exactly like this, but at least most of them)

bin    dev   mnt         root        sys   var

boot   etc   lost+found  opt         run   srv  tmp 

home   lib   media       proc        sbin  usr 

then you got the right partition.

If you have a separate boot partition, you will need to mount it. If you are not sure, check the file /mnt/etc/fstab to see if it has a partition mounted on /boot. Ignore any mention of a partition mounted on /boot/efi.

If you have a separate boot partition, mount it:

sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/boot

where sdXY is the correct label of the boot partition.

We might need to bind some additional resources (I am not sure this is necessary in this case):

for d in dev sys run proc; do sudo mount --bind /$d /mnt/$d; done

OK, now enter the chroot

sudo chroot /mnt

Now we can act as if we are in our installed system. First let's edit the configuration file:

sudoedit /etc/default/grub

(or call your favourite text editor). Find the line

GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0

(it may have a different number, but that is not important). Comment out the line by placing # at the start of it, so it says

#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0

If you do not have the above line, look for

GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden

and comment that out instead to

#GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden

check that the line

GRUB_TIMEOUT=[some number]

ends in a number greater than 0 (the default may be 10). Save the file and exit.

Run this command to write the configuration to /boot/grub/grub.cfg

sudo update-grub

Now you can reboot into your installation, and the GRUB menu will be forced to come up every time.