Ubuntu installer hangs / black screen on boot — use Safe Graphics

Ubuntu install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ✓ Verified 2026-06-04

The problem

Booting the Ubuntu install USB hangs on a black screen or a frozen logo and never reaches the installer, often on machines with an NVIDIA GPU. You may also see scary-looking firmware messages and assume the hardware is bad.

What you'll see

Black screen or frozen boot logo after selecting 'Try or Install Ubuntu'
Message: 'RDSEED32 is broken' (this one is HARMLESS on AMD -- ignore it)
Installer reached once but not on later boots

The way most sites tell you — and why it fails

✗ What the copied tutorials say

Forum threads send you chasing hardware: reseat/replace RAM, swap the USB stick, run drive self-tests, unplug every external disk -- and people burn days on it.

Replace the RAM (no change)
Re-flash a different USB stick (no change)
Run drive self-tests / unplug all external drives (no change)
Treat 'RDSEED32 is broken' as the cause (it isn't)

Why it fails: The hang is the default graphics driver failing to initialise the GPU at boot, not bad hardware. 'RDSEED32 is broken' is a normal, harmless AMD message. Chasing RAM/USB/drives never touches the real cause, so nothing improves.

The correct way — we tested this

✓ Do this instead

Boot the installer with Safe Graphics, which loads a generic display driver and gets you past the GPU hang.

At the USB boot menu, highlight 'Try or Install Ubuntu' and press 'e' (or pick the menu entry):
Choose:  *Try or Install Ubuntu (safe graphics)
Install normally from there.
After install, let Ubuntu install the proper NVIDIA driver:
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
sudo reboot

Why this works

Safe Graphics forces the nomodeset/generic path so the installer renders without the vendor GPU driver that was crashing at boot. Once Ubuntu is installed you add the real NVIDIA driver from a working desktop, where it installs cleanly. Note: a separate, persistent failure can be a leftover bad OS on disk -- a clean install of 24.04 over an unstable newer release also cured a repeating boot freeze for us.