Issues booting up Ubuntu OS with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060

Gaming and Visualization Technologies General Topics and Other SDKs Drivers - Linux, Windows, MacOS
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I recently did a PC build and all has gone fine except for having some major issues booting up. I’ve been going through stackoverflow and any resources I can find to get it sorted but I’m still having the issues.

I’ve outlined the steps and issues below and would really appreciate any help. My operating system is Ubuntu 22.04, I have an Intel i5 12600k CPU, Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU.

If I turn on the system and let it boot up without opening up the Grub menu, I’ll be greeted with the following screen and will be stuck there until I turn the system off.

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So to try find the issue, I rebooted, this time opening the grub menu and going to Advance Options for Ubuntu → recovery mode. From here I access the root shell prompt and checked the status of gdm3. It turned out it was ‘inactive and dead’.

I then turned it on from the prompt and ensured it was on before continuing boot

I expected it would boot normally now, but instead I’m greeted with a similar page to the first. There’s just a white cursor flashing. But I can open the tty from there and successfully login, just no GUI. I rechecked gdm3 was still on in tty and it was.

I’m not sure what is going on. I tried installing various packages, using different display managers, installing different nvidia drivers, but nothing.

I can boot up with ‘nomodeset’ though, so that’s something. But I’m under the impression that if I set nomodeset to be on as default, that will interfere with the functioning of my GPU. Is that correct?

Any help would be appreciated. I didn’t accept third party packages when initially setting up, but I did do a “sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras ‘’ in case there was something I was missing from that. It was a minimal install I did when setting up. Ask as many questions as you want. I really need to get this sorted. Nvidia-smi shows my GPU and the installed driver. I have secure boot disabled.

Is there a way I could access logs?

2 Likes
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Hello there @3ryancarty and welcome to the NVIDIA developer forums!

If you don’t have any critical data on the PC I would suggest you start from scratch. Reading this:

it is very likely that you have mismatching drivers installed and wrong grub/gdm settings enabled. Recovering at this point is much more complex and time consuming.

My recommendation for a fresh installation would be to start with everything on default and not install third-party packages. Ubuntu will use nouveau as default driver and the GUI should come up. Only after that you should install an official driver either from third-party packages or from our driver download pages.

If it does not, there is something else wrong which you should try to find out from the usual places like dmesg or syslog.

I hope that helps.

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I do have data and that’s why it is really important to come out from this. I cannot again start by installing ubuntu from a scratch.

Thanks for reply.

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Hello. I had a similar Issue. For me, my PC is much older than yours. It is my previous daily driver PC that I built in 2011. It has a 1st gen core i7, but also has Ubuntu installed an 8 TB of storage that I use as an FTP. I also could not re-install.

I was using an AMD RX 570. I removed those drivers with the following command:
sudo apt purge amd -y (there should be a star * on either side of the letters amd. I’m not seeing that in my post, so be aware that it should be present if you cant see it.)

I then installed my Nvidia 3060. This is when I encountered the same problem as you did. However, I reinstalled my AMD card and since it allowed me to boot to the desktop, I installed Nvidia drivers:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-470 -y

After that, I shutdown, powered down my PC and installed my Nvidia card. It hitched slightly on the same screen as you have in the image, then proceeded to boot to desktop.

This problem was a huge PITA! Hope my story helps.