Fixing Pop OS login screen error even when tty1 is not working

Medium

April 2022

I wrote this article after methods in the Pop_OS! article did not directly seem to work for me. Link to the article https://support.system76.com/articles/bootloader

How to spot the error

If you boot your system after an update and Pop_OS auto logins automatically into some default account where all other functions are disabled. You must not be able to open terminal with Super + T and going into TTY1 mode with Ctrl + Alt + F2/F3/F4/F5 also does not work

Next steps

Boot into recovery mode

Press Esc during the boot of your laptop to show the Pop_OS! selector. You must see 4 options there:

  1. Pop_OS! new kernel
  2. Pop_OS! old kernel
  3. Pop_OS! Recovery mode
  4. Boot into Firmware

Choose the Recovery mode option and let it start up.

Exit the installation option

Once the recovery mode has started you must see an option to reinstall the Operating system and start over.

Click on the option of Continue in Demo mode. This should close the installation window.

Mount the OS drive

Now mount the pre-installed and broken OS drive so that commands can be executed in it

Lets see what drives exist

lsblk

The above command should output the following when: Image of lsblk output

Most often your OS is installed in nvme0n1 . Now lets mount it to /mnt location of the recovery OS

sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /mnt

Then lets add the execution files of the broken OS and create links in order to execute the commands

for i in dev dev/pts proc sys run; do sudo mount -B /$i /mnt/$i; done
sudo cp -n /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc

Now lets get into the old OS terminal to execute the commands

sudo chroot /mnt

Output of above commands

Execute the commands to fix the broken installation

Here are the commands to clean up and broken installations

sudo apt clean
sudo apt update -m
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt install -f
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove --purge

Now lets fix the UI incase its broken

sudo apt install --reinstall plymouth gdm3 gnome-shell pop-desktop linux-generic linux-headers-generic
update-initramfs -c -k all

Close the terminal and reboot

That's it. It should now have fixed your UI and the login screen should work fine!

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