Xubuntu 14.10 reboot problem

Question

I'm running a HP 255 laptop. I was happily running Xubuntu 14.04 on it and this morning accepted the upgrade to 14.10.

All went well. I rebooted and have been using 14.10 all day.

However, I rebooted again this evening and now it won't boot up.

It gets as far as the Xubuntu 14.10 splash screen with the moving dots below it and sits there forever.

I have booted into safe mode and run both fsck and dpkg. Package manager says I'm up to date (as I should be) and fsck found a load of errors in the /tmp directory, which I fixed.

In safe mode fsck now runs clean but the system won't boot. I'm typing this on an old Toshiba I pulled out of the cupboard as it's the only machine I have available that works.

Any hints or tips to try would be most gratefully received.

Answer 1

Test this:

Switch on your computer.

Wait until the BIOS has finished loading.

Press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up the Grub menu.

Select Advanced options.

Select the line ending with recovery mode, something like:

Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.16.0-23-generic (recovery mode)

Press enter to boot.

In a sub menu with a number of options.

Select:

Network.
and
Drop to root shell prompt. 

In a terminal

Run it

mount -o remount,rw /
mount --all
dpkg --configure -a
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get autoremove
apt-get install --reinstall xubuntu-desktop
apt-get clean
reboot