Getting a:

network unclaimed error

after a recent NVIDIA or apt update command?

After a recent upgrade, system wouldn’t boot to a UI.  Blank screen is shown.  To solve this, hit SHIFT + F2 at the blank screen, to switch to a terminal login screen.  Once at the login screen, change directory to /lib/modules/:

cd /lib/modules/

and type:

ls -altri

You may see that the kernel version has been updated, potentially unsuccessfully so no network drivers can be loaded.  Try to boot with an older kernel, which was the case for us, and that allowed us to get into the system since the previous kernel apparently has the proper network drivers to load at boot time, to bring Network connectivity back.

However, how did the system error out like that in the first place?  Turns out that the WineHQ for Ubuntu had a broken repository list, erroring out any apt update.  Not 100% sure or if WineHQ updated anything in the last few days, but an:

apt update

appears to have been ran and did not properly complete.  Appears this resulted in an incomplete kernel being updated or installed.  Again not 100% sure however, there were more package definitions in:

/etc/apt/source.list.d/

for WineHQ that had to be removed.  Once this was done, running:

apt update

or

apt upgrade

completed successfully and the updated packages for the kernel were downloading, fixing the latest Kernel as well.  This fixed the issue permanently, and the need to use a previous kernel to get around the boot issue above, was resolved.

Cheers,