Hi guys! I have KDE Neon 6.2.3 running on my Surface Pro 7+, and up until now it’s been running rather smoothly, for years. But today I seem to be unable to fully boot anymore on normal mode. Linux will get stuck on the KDE spinning gear, with the gear frozen. And it becomes unresponsive, to open alternative consoles with control+alt+Fx, or even control+alt+del. The only thing that works is a force shutdown by holding the power button.
I tried with a previous kernel, with the same results (current is linux-image-6.10.10-surface-1, I have a generic 6.8.0-49, but it also freezes). I can boot in safe mode. It opens a different login screen, and after a failed attempt of opening lxde, it fails back to my usual KDE session, in safe graphics mode.
What can I test? How can I see what failed at boot?
Just an update. Today I made a rescuezilla full backup of the whole drive, and then wiped and installed KDE Neon brand new from Dec 1st release from their page. Guess what…that one ALSO fails to boot.
OK so just to confirm: you get a boot freeze even on a fresh install before you restore a backup?
Are you able to boot a liveusb?
I would try another distro just to rule out a software problem but it sounds like hardware failure. I would test your ram, graphics card, and storage medium. Do you have an SSD or an HDD?