Computer Management - Fix Most of Raven Boot Issues

2025
raven
Computer Management
Author

Sam White

Published

January 30, 2025

INTRO

Raven has been experiencing various issues when it comes to rebooting:

  1. Doesn’t reboot automatically after a power outage.

  2. Dell Pre-boot System Performance fan failure message, which prevented the system from booting without manual intervention.

  3. Booting into emergency mode.

  4. Screen doesn’t boot into Ubuntu desktop. Instead boot is successful, but just shows a log of boot loading steps on the screen.

FIXES

Performed the following changes to Raven in order to resolve most of the booting issues we’ve experienced:

  • Installed new monitor (not related to booting, obviously, but we didn’t have a monitor for Raven which made troubleshooting some of the following items impossible).

  1. In BIOS, enabled automatic reboot after power outage. Pretty sure this used to be enabled. Maybe a firmware update reset it?

  2. In BIOS, unchecked all of the boxes for HDD fan checks. The fans will be checked regardless, if the system detects that a HDD fan is installed. This will eliminate the Dell Pre-boot System Performance fan failure message, which prevented the system from booting without manual intervention. The previous fan error due to the system checking for a fan which was not installed.

  3. Fixed /etc/fstab and commented out a HDD which is no longer installed in the system. This was causing the system to boot into emergency mode due to the system looking for, and not finding, said HDD.

  • 4a. Switched desktop manager from gdm3 to lightdm in attempt to get the system to boot to the Ubuntu desktop. This did not work.

  • 4b. Edited the grub configuration file (/etc/default/grub) to avoid indefinite hang on Ubuntu splash screen:

Changed: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

To: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

RESULTS

With all of the above changes, Raven now boots successfully, without human intervention directly into a console screen. Although I couldn’t figure out how to get this to boot into the desktop, that’s really of very little consequence as this is used a “headless” system 99% of the time.