I have Ubuntu 11.10, with gnome, running on a Dell Inspiron 620.
It was running fine until the power company came around and turned off the power to change a meter. Now, when I try to boot it up, it will only start in restore mode. I tried
Check all file systems
and it reported that it had fixed the hardware clock. I then ran
Repair broken packages
and it ran to completion but it still will not start in graphics mode. Whe I try to start it up in normal mode, the screen just remains black.
When the terminal started up in restore mode, I entered
sudo service lightdm start
That got stuck on
Stopping Userspace bootsplash
I tried to fix this with the following procedure
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh -a
reboot
I went into recovery mode again and entered
sudo service lightdm start
It failed on: - Stopping automatic crash report generation - Starting deferred execution scheduler - starting save kernel messages - Starting load fallback graphics devices
This time it did get past "Stopping Userspace bootsplash"
Now it hangs on
Starting CUPS printing spooler/server