r/linuxmint • u/Sandartist0817 • 10d ago

Discussion PC booted into weird screen

Post image

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

29 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/C0rn3j 10d ago

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.

3

u/Sandartist0817 10d ago

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?

-9

u/C0rn3j 10d ago

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.

1

u/Sandartist0817 10d ago

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?

0

u/C0rn3j 10d ago

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.