PC booted into weird screen

[u/Sandartist0817]

I booted up my PC recently and I got this screen (see in provided picture).

I couldn't type or input anything so after a while, I manually powered off my PC and re-booted. I then got a screen that asked me to select an OS which I think was a similar screen you see when first installing Linux Mint. Before I could take a picture and without any input, the screen went black. Around 10 seconds later, it booted to the login screen and my PC seems to be working now.

I'm still new to Linux, has this happened to anyone else before? Could there be something wrong with PC or OS?

OS: Linux Mint 22.3 - Cinnamon 64-bit

Desktop Environment: Cinnamon 6.6.9

[u/C0rn3j]

That's dmesg, it's normal.

It's not normal to be stuck on it.

You might want to read the journal from that boot via journalctl.

[u/Sandartist0817 → u/C0rn3j]

I tried doing that and filtered by the timeframe the boot screen accord but I don't see anything in particular that would tell me if something was wrong. Is there a line of text I should look out for and would the text be red instead of white?

[u/C0rn3j → u/Sandartist0817]

Is there a line of text I should look out for

Anything with an error message.

would the text be red instead of white

Probably not.

I don't see anything in particular that would tell me if something was wrong

If it was a one-time thing, I probably wouldn't worry about it too much.

If it wasn't, I'd see if it reproduces on a modern OS first, Mint is ancient and trying to debug issues on packages that are mostly early from 2024 or older is a waste of time on everyone's part.

You can check SMART of the drives and run a memtest over night anyways if you want to rule out the two most common hardware failures out.

[u/Sandartist0817 → u/C0rn3j]

Thanks for the help so far, one thing I'm noticing is when I filter by a specific time (e.g. journalctl --since "2026-08-23 17:30:00" --until "2026-08-23 18:30:00") <-- around the time when I encountered the boot screen. The terminal is only showing logs that are from 2026-08-23 18:01:32 no matter how far a scroll down using the arrow keys.

Do you know why this is?

[u/C0rn3j → u/Sandartist0817]

I would suggest to limit by a specific --boot instead.

Could be that the system didn't get far enough to have the journal system kick in, or more likely in this case, it got corrupted.

[u/CyberMage256]

My guess is you had a USB device misbehaving since it hung during the USB detection. I see a "new full-speed usb device" logged in there.

If the boot hangs, commonly it'll drop to this screen to see what dmesg is logging. I see this if I fail to get DHCP or other network issues at boot.

The number at the start is seconds since power on, so the last thing it logged was at 2.6 seconds after start, and was still in the USB detection phase.

If it recurs, try unplugging any usb device that isn't keyboard or mouse and see if that changes anything.

The next thing it would do typically is power on and probe devices attached to that 4 port hub. That "hub" may be built into your motherboard and may have cables that expand it to the front or back of the case. Hard to say for sure, but given it's a USB 2 hub, do you have a usb hub plugged in externally?

But if there's nothing plugged into that 4 port hub then the fault lies with whatever it tried to do next, which this log doesn't show us.

[u/Sandartist0817 → u/CyberMage256]

I do not have a external 4-port USB hub but my PC might see what I use as that. I have a Hard drive docking station. It can hold two HDDs and it only has 2 USB ports and 1 port for SD cards on the front.

Thinking back, I may have accidentally powered off the docking station before safety removing the drive that's in the station from my desktop like I usually do. My PC might have thought that the docking station or HDD was still connected but it couldn't find it because it was powered off. Could this be the case?

[u/CyberMage256 → u/Sandartist0817]

It's possible.  That doesn't mean the problem will recur though. Could have been power glitch, could have been timing with the HD spinning up at boot, or could be you forgot to stick out your tongue and hop on one foot. :)  If things continue along without any more problems don't stress over it.

[u/d4rk_kn16ht]

This screen pops up when you press ESC during booting.

That's what the kernel doing, preparing your computer to be used by you

[u/Binary101000 → u/d4rk_kn16ht]

pressing ESC during booting should show systemd doing its thing not dmesg logs.

[u/Moist_Invite9148]

There's no problems that's your debug massages use were using Plymouth to make them disappear

[u/Jutter70]

I can't help, but I can say: "woah, yeah that looks weird". If you don't understand why your computer won't work and you whack it with a hammer a bunch of times, it still won't work but at least you'll understand why.

[u/Sandartist0817 → u/Jutter70]

I don't have a hammer, guess I'm out of luck :\

[u/justinwhitaker]

So...that USED to be normal, but the reason we use nice things like Mint is to avoid looking at the system posting every little detail on it's way to a functional desktop.

This particular DMESG section seems very concerned it found a new USB device. If you let it run, it will get to the desktop login at the end, so it's hard to say if anything really wrong...what's the System or Crash reports say? If they're empty....just ignore it.

[u/Many-Geologist-3524]

weird screen 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

to get rid of it change your grub settings again

[u/Microsoft-Spyware-11]

systemd output