Gnome Boot Problem

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greetings all. running CentOS 7. i recently performed an upgrade and the server rebooted later in the night. now everytime i start my server its sits at the grey gnome background. i can hit ctl+atl+f2 to get to another console and the error message states “a start job is running for wait for plymouth boot screen to quit”. i can SSH into the server but i dont see any obvious issues. this is the brain of my network and houses all my vms and documents. any help would be greatly appreciated.

15 thoughts on - Gnome Boot Problem

  • Alt+d will switch to the text output of the init process.  Press that combo as soon as you see the boot animation.

  • Not understanding. At what point in the boot process should I be doing that and why would I need to do that at all? Seems like it’s something wrong with the Plymouth and plymouth-scirpt packages….I uninstalled them and rebooted I didn’t get stuck in a loop but I didn’t have a gui. I
    reinstalled and I’m back at the Plymouth wait error.

  • There’s lots of reasons for this – try googling for that message.

    A common one is bad video drivers, especially nVidia – nVidia helpfully stop supporting certain older cards in the newer drivers, so if you have a card that drops support in the most recent driver, you have to specifically use an old driver version.

    But basically anything that holds up the boot process will eventually cause this message – it’s not really an error message either, it’s just telling you that it’s waiting for something to happen – the problem is elsewhere.

    P.

  • …and if you use the nvidia driver packages from elrepo, the yum-plugin-nvidia package prevents yum from updating nvidia drivers on older hardware where support for that hardware has been dropped.

  • Ok that’s what I figured Ive narrowed it down to Plymouth but I haven’t found much info on what the fix is. As of now I can ctl alt f2 and run startx to get to a desktop. When I try to run gui (such as keepnote or chromium) from within my vms now tho I get errors.

  • … as soon as you see the boot animation.  When you see the grey screen, use Alt+d on the keyboard to switch to the text output. There, you will typically see text that describes why the boot process isn’t completing.

    Because long ago the debugging text was deemed confusing, and a graphical wallpaper was placed over it.

    That’s unlikely.  Those packages are probably just hiding the actual problem.

  • No, plymouth is the process that controls the booting process. It is not the problem. It is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing –
    waiting for a process to finish before going on to its next task. You should use journalctl to see what task it is waiting on.

    What graphics card do you have?

    What errors.

    P.

  • Ok so I tried alt+d it switched over to text mode. I didn’t see any error it booted right to a black screen. I can ctl+alt+f2 to get to another screen and I still get the “a start job is running for wait for Plymouth boot screen to quit”

  • dominic adair-jones wrote:
    Please stop top posting.

    It really sounds like a graphics driver error. Have you looked in
    /var/log/Xorg.0.log?

    mark

  • sorry about that first time publicly posting like this. I will check this evening. I did remove the x0rg drivers and plymouth but didnt check the logs as it got late.

  • dominic adair-jones wrote:

    Reading the thread in this post, I see you saying that startx works…. That would suggest that graphics works, but something in trying to go into runlevel 5 is funny.

    Stupid question: how long have you waited? C7 seems to take an unconsciously long time for the X login to come up.

    Do you see the screen go into graphical mode during the boot? You know, when it’ll go black, then smaller fonts, and more lines on the screen?

    Starting to wonder about a timing issue, with a driver not loading.

    mark

  • yessir i can alt+ctl+f2 into another tty and run startx from there to get into my desktop as of this morning the “plymouth wait” error was running for about 6
    hours whatever is causing it to hang never completes the screen does go into graphical mode..i unlock my volume and then the grey background with the 7 and spinning white circle comes up…the circle spins out and then the screen just sits there it never boots into the actual desktop.

    this happened about a month ago i ran a kernel update, then clean up. i went to sleep and my server shut off. I turned it back on and have been experiencing this issue ever since. I removed plymouth and then logged into the 2nd tty and just left it running for about a month since its my host and i had alot of stuff on there i needed to access. i have a little downtime for the next few days so im trying to go back and get this figured out.

  • This sounds like some kind of GDM issue to me.

    I am not sure the OP has ever answered the question of what video card is installed.

    OP: If you look at Xorg.0.log that should tell you if there is a problem starting X. If you use /var/log/messages, dmseg, and/or journalctl it might give you an init type error output.

  • thanks, looking thru the log i attached i did notice the gdm error. As a workaround i installed/switched over to lightdm. still going to figure out what went wrong with gdm.