On 13/05/12 15:14, Russell Coker wrote:
Is Ubuntu one of those distributions that starts X really early in the boot? If so there should be a way of disabling that to get a text mode boot. Completing the upgrade in text mode should be possible.
No, it’s not. Fedora and Red Hat were the ones to do that in the olden days, but since Plymouth, they don’t do it these days either. But they do have the “quiet” and “splash” boot parameters enabled by default, which hides any useful output. On 13/05/12 14:09, Wen Lin wrote:
Instead, when his PC (there is no dual-boot in this machine - just pure Ubuntu) rebooted, after going pass the usual BIOS/Video card splash screen, followed by a quick splash of the Ubuntu logo, he got a blank screen. Not even the usual Ubuntu boot option list was displayed - just a black screen (with a tiny top bit coloured ubuntu purple).
Try holding Shift as you boot up. The GRUB menu is hidden by default if there is no other OS installed. You should be able to select a recovery option from there. If that doesn’t work, you may need to boot from a live CD, mount the target system, chroot in, and run "apt-get -f install" to complete the remaining installation. Of course, if there has been too much damage done, then this may not work, and you will need to follow Russell’s guidelines for recovering the system. I should point out that no operating system is invulnerable from monkey attacks like this one. I have seen Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X installations b0rked due to upgrades where a monkey took control before it completed. Unfortunately that’s the way the cookie crumbles, and data recovery is probably the best long-term option.