Black Screen of Death

Hi,
I wanted to revive my old laptop (4GB of RAM, Intel Core i3 2.3GHz) from Windows 7 era.
I loaded Manjaro Stable onto USB stick, set up BIOS to boot from USB first.

All I got is “black screen of death”, with the exception of some text in the top left corner.
It goes something like this: “GRUB!”. I have no idea what is going on.

I also tried Ubuntu, MX, Mint and even Fedora and they are all fine. Manjaro on the other hand gave me this “BSOD” and I couldn’t boot it. I’ve heard hat Manjaro has the best out of the box experience and you are pretty much set up after installation (graphic drivers, codecs, Libre Office,…), but it failed to boot.

I wish I could try Manjaro. I have been told its has decent out of the box experience, but I guess I will never know.

It might very well be your BIOS VGA support doesn’t work well with the Manjaro Live USB disk.

Maybe it’s nothing serious and it just wont display the Pretty boot menu.

Could you try after it get stuck on the black screen, pressing Down ARROW twice and the Return key to confirm booting.

Worth trying

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I guess you didn’t bother to read the post and immediately blamed it on the user. Thanks very much.

I don’t see anything wrong with freed00m’s answer, it doesn’t blame the user at all. You asked and someone gave you advice. The advice could work or not, but be thankful and polite in either case.

You don’t even explain your problem correctly, as the text “GRUB!” doesn’t seem to be a text that grub outputs in any case. Probably you are been shown the grub prompt. Something like “grub>”. I would say that probably the Manjaro ISO is not correct (download problems) or it is not properly wrote to the USB stick. Check the checksum of your ISO file and try to write again to the USB media with verification.

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How? I am sorry you see it this way. Just wanted to give advice that might work.

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To be fair there is “Welcome to GRUB!” message in the GRUB2 software.
I am not sure if manjaro makes and attempt to hide it.

But it seems corupted, for Manjaro ISOs I have best luck using Rufus in “dd” mode on windows and from linux plain dd

You still blaming it on me. I have asked other pple from other distros. Manjaro is not booting on BIOS. Manjaro is only compatible with UEFI. Good luck.

I am not blaming, why are you projecting something ? + what is with that attitude, we are trying to help.

I have plenty non UEFI systems and booting just fine.

EDIT: it boots on Coreboot (no UEFI code there) without VGA bios and just pure libgfxinit

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BSOD is Window :joy: