Can't get login screen after upgrading to Debian12

[tagal4]

I upgraded to Debian 12 using the terminal on my desktop (main) computer and now I can't get a login screen after booting the computer up; I just get a black screen with a little dash in the upper left hand corner, so I end up having to shut the computer off by holding in the start button on the front of it until it shuts off (so it doesn't run all the time). When I start the computer and the test results show up in the list of tests the computer does when I start it up I get "failed to start raise interfaces". I've researched this online (on my laptop, which I have a hard time using) and can't find anything to solve the problem, so I would appreciate any help with solving this problem.

Even though I've had Linux computers for a number of years now I'm not a Linux whiz by any stretch of the imagination, so please keep that in mind if you respond. Thanks in advance for any help.

[Uptorn]

Do you see the GRUB screen at any point in the process? Or it just goes straight to the blinking cursor without any other display?

Also, I know this is probably "too little, too late", but how did you upgrade to Bookworm? People often pass around the notion that one can just change sources.list and run apt full-upgrade. But, while this usually works, there is actually a more thorough procedure to minimize the chances of things breaking when upgrading between stable releases.

[tagal4]

Well, I told you wrong. I guess it was Debian 11 (Bullseye) I upgraded to.

There's a screen that comes up briefly for about a second that says "GRUB" if that's what you mean by the GRUB screen.

[Uptorn]

Disclaimer: I am speculating as to what the issue is, based on the provided information.

That is good that GRUB is showing. We can rule out more serious issues being the cause.

I am speculating, based on prior experience, that something might be broken with your display stack. We can test this by pressing 'E' when the GRUB splash appears, to temporarily edit your entry on GRUB. Add "nomodeset" to the end of the line starting with "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX"

From there, does it still boot to a blank screen? Or is there some other output?

[tagal4]

When I press E when the GRUB flash appears I get a page titled GNU GRUB version 2.06-3 deb11u6. On that page there isn't any line that you mentioned. On the bottom it says I can press F2 for a command line if that matters.

[Uptorn]

I don't access GRUB very often, so my memory of it is fuzzy. Either pressing Esc (or Tab?) should bring you to the following screen:

From there, the E key will allow you to edit the entries in a vim like editor.

[tagal4]

I know how how to get to the above menu, but what do I do once I get there? When I highlight either choice and hit E I get list of nonsensical phrases, but none that begin with "grub..." as mentioned previously.

Can I boot into a terminal and remove and reinstall lightdm? I've found posts online about that solving the problem I have.

[tagal4]

This sure isn't a very helpful forum.

[CwF]

I just get a black screen with a little dash in the upper left hand corner

What happens when you switch TTY's?
Press <Ctrl><Alt><F2>
F2 can be F1-F6, the current blank is likely on F7, tty7

It the switch is successful you will get a logon prompt. Proceed...

[Uptorn]

I know how how to get to the above menu, but what do I do once I get there? When I highlight either choice and hit E I get list of nonsensical phrases, but none that begin with "grub..." as mentioned previously.

Sorry, I shouldn't be advising from memory alone. It turns out, that is when editing grub from a fully booted system.

I just tested with a spare and that screen with the 'nonsensical phrases' is correct. You want to go to the line beginning with:

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linux 

and ending with:

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quiet

With the cursor placed just after "quiet", append a space and "nomodeset" (without the quotation marks). Then press F10.

It should start with software video mode and no GPU acceleration, just for testing purposes. Don't worry, the change is not permanent and won't be present the next time you boot.

Can I boot into a terminal and remove and reinstall lightdm? I've found posts online about that solving the problem I have.

It would be possible to chroot from a live USB to make such changes, but before resorting to that, please consider trying CwF and I's suggestions.

[tagal4]

I tried typing in nomodeset after making a space after "quiet" then pressing f10. This didn't work to bring anything up.

I manged to get to a command line after following advice given on various old forum posts, and when I try get anything but a blank screen from there I end up from there I end up with:
xinit: giving up
xinit: unable to connect to x server: Connection refused
xinit: server error

[tagal4]

BTW, I can boot my computer from a live installation dvd, so I think my video drivers are working okay. I don't want to have to wipe my hard drive by doing a clean install because the file back-up I did apparently failed, so I'm starting to panic about not being able to fix this.

[Uptorn]

I manged to get to a command line after following advice given on various old forum posts,
...
I don't want to have to wipe my hard drive by doing a clean install because the file back-up I did apparently failed, so I'm starting to panic about not being able to fix this.

No need for alarm, as long as you can reach terminal login, your system and all its file should be accessible. If you determine that a reinstall is the easiest fix, then files can be copied out with a tool like rsync. Or just backed up from within a live USB session.

Hopefully somebody more knowledgeable about display servers than myself can offer some assistance. Otherwise, if I were in the same situation, some of the options shared here would be the first things I might try.

[Mort]

@tagal4 It sounds like it could well be a problem with the display drivers. I believe the drivers on the DVD would be different from the ones on the OS on your hard drive. Does your computer have AMD, Intel or Nvidia graphics? Is your monitor plugged in to a discrete graphics card or the integrated graphics?

[tagal4]

I believe they are nvidia graphics

[Mort]

Nvidia is notorious for not working well with Debian. Are you using the open source nouveau drivers or did you install the proprietary drivers as described in the following link https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers? It's common for the drivers to need some tinkering to get working again after the kernel has been updated, which is what happened when you upgraded. If your monitor works after plugging it into the integrated graphics instead of the Nvidia card, that's a good confirmation that the issue is with the Nvidia drivers.

[tagal4]

How come, then, I was able to upgrade from Debian 9 to 10 in the terminal with no problems? The only problem I've ever had upgrading Debian (before that) in the terminal was with a lightdm issue, and I can't remember how I fixed it. Maybe I need to go back and review my old posts to see if I turned to this forum for help with that issue in the distant past.

[tagal4]

Is there a good, easy to understand tutorial on how to copy files to a USB stick in Debian using terminal commands? I can't seem to find what I'm looking for doing online searches of this topic. I really would like to get my files backed up before I do anything else to fix this problem so I don't risk losing them in case something even worse happens to my computer in the process of trying different ways to solve this problem.

[Mort]

How come, then, I was able to upgrade from Debian 9 to 10 in the terminal with no problems?

I don't know but things change over time. I would suggest ruling out any problems with the display drivers before continuing to troubleshoot. Without knowing which drivers you're using and whether or not you're using a graphics card it's hard to pinpoint the issue.

[Silent Observer]

Is there a good, easy to understand tutorial on how to copy files to a USB stick in Debian using terminal commands?

If you know the device name of the USB stick and the location of the file you want to copy, it should be the same as copying files between any two devices. You'll have a command of the form

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cp <filename_full_path> <destination_path>

That's the same in all Debian-based distros and I believe the same in Red Hat derived and even original Unix as well.

Now, finding the path for your USB stick may be a little more complicated. I saw

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fdisk -l

recently as a way list all filesystems, though I usually use

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lsblk

when I don't need every detail about each entry. Your USB will usually start with sd (for instance, with my three internal drives, the first USB stick I mount is sdd), so to copy myfile.zip from my Downloads folder to the root folder of the USB stick, I'd type

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cp /home/user/Downloads/myfile.zip sdd/

As with everything else, you can use wildcards to copy multiple files with a single command; if I wanted to copy everything from my "USB Backup" folder (itself in my /home), I'd use

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cp "/home/user/USB Backup/*.*" sdd/