My Problem

A laptop I was given (An Acer Travelmate B117) only shows a dimly lit black screen after grub. Live distros boot fine. Afaik the machine does not have a dedicated graphics card.

What I've tried

Reinstalling

• I've reinstalled various distributions with various combinations of settings at least a dozen times now:
  
  
  
  
  • Tried Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Mate, even CentOS to get another Base distro
  
  
  • Tried enabling and disabling LUKS and full disk encryption
  
  
  
  


• Boot options:
  
  
  
  
  • Legacy: gives the black screen
  
  
  • UEFI with secure boot on: Gives me fatal a 0xA1 error before even getting to grub, I guess the machine is too old to recognize Ubuntus secure boot keys?
  
  
  • UEFI with secure boot of: the machine doesn't recognize the internal disc, boots straight to the usb key; live distros recognize the disk though
  
  
  
  


• TPM on/off


• installing with and without 3rd party drivers


• installing with wifi connected / disconnected

Resetting the machine

I know that at some point antergos has been running on the machine, it was set up by another guy, not the machines primary user. When I got my hands on the machine, various attempts to reinstall Ubuntu had been made and the black screen was already appearing.

• Reset the BIOS to factory defaults


• Reset Secure Boot keys


• Reset the TPM


• livebooted and completely nuked the disc (seems to be on board eMMC, BIOS calls it a SD-Card) via GParted by deleting all partitions and rewriting the partition table (msdos while Legacybooting, gpt while UEFI-booting

Via grub

• tried booting to recovery, black screen again


• edited the entry to change to nomodeset, black screen again

While on the black screen

• Entered the LUKS password (when applicable) and pressed Enter


• Pressed various combinations of Arrow-Keys and Ctrl+Alt+F1...F7 to get to another TTY


• waited for 3+ hours

Booting via stick

My last idea was to use a bootable stick and choose the bootloaders option to just boot the first hard disk to get some verbose output. I'm not too sure if the machine simply tried booting from the usb key, but what I get seems to be an early failure of initramfs:

My only idea at this point is to use a different HDD via sata, unfortunately I can't get my hands on one right now.
Is there anything else I could try?

It was indeed a faulty eMMC storage, which could be written but apparently not read. Fixed it by installing a new SATA SSD, but I'll let the post stay up since it's a nice listing of troubleshooting ideas.