Turns out this has nothing to do with a battery (mine is a desktop system), this is just where boot hangs if you have video driver problems.
After trying many, many, many, many, many, many, things, including a fresh install, here's what finally got it working for me...
It was the combination of this post:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get install --reinstall gdm xorg
And this post:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get remove nvidia-* sudo apt-get install linux-headers-'uname -r' sudo apt-get install nvidia-current sudo nvidia-xconfig sudo apt-get update echo options nouveau modeset=0 | sudo tee --append /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-kms.conf echo RUN+="/sbin/modprobe nvidia" | sudo tee --append /etc/udev/rules.d/90-modprobe.rules sudo update-initramfs -u sudo reboot
What I actually ended up doing was the gdm and xorg reinstall from the first post, then the second post and then the first post again.
I suspect I could have just done second post followed by first post, but haven't done a clear re-install to try it.