ubuntu 20.04 only boots from recovery mode

After a power outage, my ubuntu 20.04 boots from the normal option in grub to a black screen and hangs there. However, if I go to Advanced Options and select recovery mode and then "resume", it is able to boot up. What went wrong? how can I fix it? Note: I found many solutions to this problem, not all worked for me so I figure that there are many things that could go wrong. It might be nice to have many optional solutions listed in the answers for this problem :)