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I'm running on a fairly old HP Pavilion x360 - 13-a110dx (ENERGY STAR) with the newest BIOS firmware available. It has Intel HD 5500 graphics and 4 GB RAM. I'm currently trying to install ANY linux distribution to it from USB -- I can boot into the live USB just fine, however, whether I try to "Try it Without Installing" or "Install" it just goes to a black screen. Both UEFI and CSM mode do this. In CSM mode I can get to the purple screen where I select nomodeset etc, then it goes to splash screen for a hot minute and then to a black screen with a white pointer that freezes. I do not want to keep anything on my Hard Drive currently.

  • Ubuntu
  • Manjaro
  • Arch

All of these do the same thing: black screen.

I have tried in boot options:

  • nomodeset
  • text mode
  • various combinations of acpi="something"
  • attempting to get to TTY via keyboard shortcuts

I have seen the megapost about this issue with all the workarounds and none of them have worked.

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  • The closest relevant finding from my side is this dated thread on Arch Linux Forums. That has mention of the boot option acpi_osi="!Windows 2013" which seems to agree with this dated post on Ask Ubuntu. Besides this, I am out of idea.
    – user125388
    Apr 11, 2019 at 16:58
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    @clearkimura Thank you very much for the suggestion, it didn't seem to work, but I eventually did get it to work with the following options added in place of "quiet splash ---" "acpi=off nomodeset debug="
    – TheMrMittens
    Apr 11, 2019 at 17:38

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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So this is how I fixed it --

Upon booting the Ubuntu Live CD I had to changed the Linux boot parameter to have acpi=off nomodeset debug=. I believe this was overkill as to boot Ubuntu I had to just use acpi=off.

Now -- this would disable all of my acpi so I had no battery stats and my computer thought it was in airplane mode -- no good. Eventually I followed a step by step guide to determine why acpi was the issue, turns out it wasn't.

All I ended up having to do was add to my boot parameters acpi_osi= because this HP BIOS is a little funky -- this solved all of my issues.

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  • +1 for your effort. Debian 8 Live had even more boot options: noapic noapm nodma nomce nolapic nomodeset nosmp nosplash, which is the longest "failsafe" boot option I have seen so far.
    – user125388
    Apr 12, 2019 at 7:02

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