Yesterday I upgraded it to Mint 21, and then to 21.1, hoping that the newer operating system would fix its problems. After letting it sit for a day, I tried turning it on and it booted without any problem, except for the usual flashing messages. Since then, it has had boot errors come and go, and about a month ago it got to the point where nothing seemed to work and I was unable to use it at all. When I purchased the laptop, it had Windows 10 on it, I formatted the drive and loaded Mint 20.3 on it. I assume those messages are telling me something interesting, but I don't know how to find them. After I logged on, everything seems to be fine. This time it flashed several messages on the screen, paused for a couple of seconds, flashed 3 or 4 more messages, blanked the screen, and after a few more seconds, presented me with the logon screen. Attempting to continue didn't do anything useful, so I gave up, pressed the power switch to shut down and tried again. This morning during the boot up process it stopped and told me I needed to load the kernel before I did anything else. When I boot it, it frequently doesn't quite work, but sometimes works fine.

I have a Dell laptop - Model Inspii5 - inxi report below.

Pcloud linux mint