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When I tried to install my Ubuntu 16.04.2 I faced with no screen problem! and PCI_bus errors! after many searching and trying only this modifications on /etc/default/grub solved my problem:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pci=noaer pci=nomsi" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="text pci=noaer pci=nomsi"

When I tried each one(pci=nomsi or pci=noaer) alone, it didn't work! and only this modification worked!

And the other strange thing is, I before had installed this ubuntu on this laptop without any problems! but this time I faced this problem!

By the way, it works nice at now, and I want to know what do these changes do and is it possible to damage my laptop?

EDIT: After restarting my computer I encountered to the problem again (a violet blank locked screen, after choosing ubuntu from grub menu) and I forced to shutdown my pc by power key! then after turning it on it worked good!

I don't know what is this strange problem and how can I fix it?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pci=noaer pci=nomsi"

  • quiet = do not display verbose text during boot, show one background screen instead with an hourglass or something. The alternative to this is verbose. Generally if nothing is specified, it defaults to quiet. Won't break anything to either have or not have this.
  • splash = if present causes splash screen to show up. Won't break anything to either have or not have this.
  • pci=noaer = no pci advanced error reporting. Will not break anything if you specify this; basic effect in my experience is AER messages in /var/log/messages are suppressed, and can be useful if specified in troubleshooting PCI bus problems with nvidia GPU compute cards on pcie.
  • pci=nomsi = no system wide message signaled interrupts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Signaled_Interrupts; I would be careful with this one and only use it for troubleshooting purposes; if you do use it then know how to edit GRUB at boot time to remove it to be able to boot then re-modify grub.cfg. Redhat has a why is pci=nomsi needed or recommended by my hardware vendor. Basically they elaborate on how not all machines or chipsets support MSI correctly. I suspect that if you disable MSI that you should be able to at least boot to runlevel 3 and log in. I think if MSI is disabled then things fall back to pin based interrupts. See if you can reference The MSI Driver Guide HOWTO dated 2003/2004/2008 which is also under redhat access... MSI capability was first specified in PCI 2.2 and was later enhanced in PCI 3.0; There are three reasons why using MSIs can give an advantage over traditional pin-based interrupts ... get's technical.

This question being > 1 year old and about ubuntu 16.04, also try using a later updated version (currently at 19.04) unless u need specifically 16.04

The two major settings of noaer and nomsi would not damage your laptop, worst case system freezes and you hold power button to reboot, maybe lose some data on disk. Don't overlook the possible coincidence of hardware failing (after all it is a laptop) so try installing 1 or 2 other distributions of linux to see if problem persists.

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I know this is old, but you should be able to fix this by simply running sudo update-grub after saving your edits. Check after running to make sure your edits are saved in /boot/grub/grub.cfg and you should be good to reboot.

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