I have a laptop that I have used for many years, and it has had Ubuntu on it since maybe version 8.04 or so.
This morning I upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10. The upgrade process went perfectly smoothly until it rebooted.
Now, when the computer boots, it goes into some kind of memory test, and never reaches GRUB.
On the one hand, it would seem that this is a hardware memory failure, and nothing to do with the operating system. On the other hand, I can't shake the feeling that it seems the timing is more than just coincidental. If my memory were as cataclysmically faulty as it now appears, I'm sure I would have seen some problems before today. In my experience, memory tends to start failing bit by bit, not all at once like this.
Is it just a horrible coincidence, or is there anything about an OS that can impact or trigger a problem like I'm seeing?
I've tried rebooting, but it will not get past the memory test. The memory test itself seems to go on indefinitely. It's been over 24 hours and it's still going.