I recently upgraded my HTPC to 11.04 and since it comes with the Unity dock I decided to get rid of Cairo dock. Unfortunately, while trying to uninstall Cairo dock I ended up removing too many packages (I even saw some NVidia packages being removed) and Ubuntu won't run anymore. I get to a black screen which lists a bunch of daemons that have started and then it goes no further, not even a command prompt. I can get to the command prompt if I start in recovery mode.
I have tried running the following commands but none of them fixed the problem:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
This one completed successfully but did nothing.
dpkg-reconfigure -phigh -a
This failed, I don't have the exact error message right now, but it complained about an unrecognized image or some such thing.
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
This didn't seem to do anything.
I can reinstall the OS without any loss of data because all of it is on a second drive, the only changes I'd made to the OS were installing XBMC, Samba and Cairo dock. However, to complicate things further, I can't boot off of a USB drive anymore! I know that used to work because that was how I'd installed Lucid in the first place, but now, even though the BIOS list an attached storage device, Grub (or maybe it's the BIOS? not sure which one) won't recognize that the USB drive is bootable. I've tried creating the bootable USB using UNetbootin and Universal USB Installer, with both 11.04 and 10.04, but no combination is working. The PC does not have an optical drive, so USB is the only option.
Is there a command-line command to reinstall the OS? Or do I need to pull the hard drive and wipe it?
EDIT 1
Running ls /var/log/dpkg.*
lists the following files:
- /var/log/dpkg.log
- /var/log/dpkg.log.1
- /var/log/dpkg.log.2.gz
...
- /var/log/dpkg.log.10.gz
I tried to upload the first log file to pastebin using pastebinit /var/log/dpkg.log
but it fails with the following error:
IOError: [Errno socket error] [Errno 104] Connection reset by peer
dpkg-reconfigure -phigh -a
fails with the following error:
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic-pae
cron stop/waiting
dpkg-maintscript-helper: error: couldn't identify the package
ls /var/log/dpkg.*
to see what's available.pastebinit
is a useful tool for getting big log files out of a headless system (it posts the whole file to paste.ubuntu.com so you can either get at it from a graphical system or share it with us.pastebinit
tip, that should save me a whole bunch of typing :)