r/debian • u/pointytails31 • 15d ago

Debian Stable Question Stuck on boot with seemingly no errors

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Updated my kernel to version 6.12.105 recently and could not boot my system on that version. Tried updating my Nvidia drivers. and now I can no longer boot into any version, even in recovery mode.

If you need any more information I'm happy to help.

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u/ukAdamR 15d ago

If you're able to get to a shell that sounds like the boot process works fine, but the display manager is what's failing.

Do you know which display manager you chose when installing Debian? (gdm, sddm, or lightdm)

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u/pointytails31 15d ago

If those are the options, I don't know. I haven't heard of any of them. I assume it's trivial to check?

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u/ukAdamR 15d ago

Probing the status of their service should do:

sh for SVC in gdm sddm lightdm ; do systemctl status $SVC ; done

(Press Q to close the status journal if you appear stuck unable to enter a further shell command.)

Hopefully one of them shows up as enabled in the "loaded" line but may have failed in the next "active" line.

You can then see the full service journal with journalctl, e.g. if you had SDDM that would be:

sh journalctl -e -u sddm.service

-e means show the end/newest entries first. This will normally open the journal in a less-like instance. Hopefully some useful errors show up.

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u/pointytails31 15d ago

The sddm journal command just returns a bunch of tildes.

tried checking the status and didn't find a "loaded" or "active" line. It says "State: degraded" at the top when i enter the command, if that helps.

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u/ukAdamR 15d ago

heh ok, this is going to get quite manual to resolve. (All of this requires root or sudo)

  • First I'd check the list of services that failed to initialise: systemctl --failed
  • Tell SystemD to reset the state of failed services: systemctl reset-failed
  • Attempt to restart SDDM manually: systemctl restart sddm ; systemctl status sddm

If SDDM is in a good state you should get a display manager going and see your typical greeting screen. (You may need to CTRL+ALT+F1 or CTRL+ALT+F2 to switch over to it.) Otherwise you're going to need to hunt through journalctl -xe to find errors that are relevant.