Went down for restart, won't come back up

Question

I installed updates, GNOME3, xampp, netbeans and a set of drivers. I went to restart the machine, and when coming back on, it hangs on a purple screen trying to turn back on. When I try to tap escape in order to get into the "safe" mode, it still hangs on the purple screen then eventually displays ^[^[^[^[ on the screen. It doesn't respond to keystrokes after that, but it does respond to the power button - it shuts back down gracefully, with the Ubuntu logo.

I booted into the cd and just ran it from there, so I'm thinking I can try and fix whatever damage is done and try to boot back from the hard drive. Any ideas on what went wrong and how to fix it?

Answer 1

Third
Gnome-3 installed from ppa is know to cause bugs for some people. Let's revert to Gnome-2 and after we have a functional Graphical environment then you may re-install Gnome-3, what do you think?

Run these commands at terminal successively one by one:

sudo apt-get remove libgtk-3-common
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get install gnome-panel  
sudo reboot now

If you still have problems then run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Reference: here.

Second
Try to re-set the default Desktop Manager. At terminal, run this:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm

First
After the boot you can go to a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1) then try to reconfigure xorg pasting this:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg