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I am new to Ubuntu community so I may make some obvious mistakes.
My problems started when all tool bars and window bars just disappeared. I rebooted hoping that it will fix it self. But then I was stuck at purple booting screen.
It seamed to be a common issue so I found a lot of solutions in forums. I remembered that on the last run Ubuntu asked to install some updates, so I thought maybe problem was with the updates. Even so I couldn't fix it.
Using Ctrl+Alt+F2 I was able to get to terminal but the system turned read only so almost none commands where executed and the ones executed resulted in errors. Before the load of terminal it would display some errors with grub.
So I burned Ubuntu on a CD and made CD-ROM a primary booting device. Hoping for a CDLive boot which would let me run test on HDD. However I would see the same screen I see launching every time it is a screen in which lets you chose between OS systems (I have Windows 7 on the same machine).
Finally here is my question:

How to boot from dual OS system into CD booted Ubuntu start to fix the disk issues? And maybe is there another way out of my sticky situation?

EDIT: Adding some missing data and updates on current status.

  1. I was using Ubuntu 11.10 version.
  2. I was browsing the internet with Firefox and Transmission was downloading some files and VLC was playing some music in a background. I really think this was irrelevant. Earlier that day I was trying to install Apache Solr and Tomcat and it seams Tomcat installed fine but I have not finished configuration of Solr.
  3. I wasn't loading from CD drive earlier because the disk was scratched I made another copy and now it sems to load but that does not seam too be of much help. Disk Utility finds errors in my drives but is not able to do anything else. I tried running fsck with no result too.
  4. I know that sudo is required for some commands to be prosecuted but that is the main problem every time I try to execute sudo command I get response like this:

    can`t open /var/lib/sudo/username/tty2 Read only file system

  5. I was using default Ubuntu interface so I think it was Unity.
So now my question changes a bit:
How to fix Ubuntu file system if it turned to read only mode?

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1) What version of Ubuntu are you using? 2) What did you do to cause the desktop environment to crash? 3) If the menu is loading that gives you the option to load Windows 7, then you are not booting from the CD drive. Go back into the BIOS and set it correctly. 4) Some commands need you to put sudo in front of them and then you give your user password. 5) Are you using Unity or something else as the User interface? – grahammechanical Feb 5 at 14:16
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