What happened
I was working on my laptop while it upgraded from 15.10 to 16.04 (which I admit was a mistake) when suddenly the Unity overlay disappeared and the only thing on screen was the Firefox browser window. I switched to a new terminal, logged in and tried to run sudo service lightdm restart
but instead of restarting correctly, the screen started turning on and off repeatedly, which freaked me out, so I physically turned off the PC.
Long story short: I forced a shutdown halfway through the Ubuntu upgrade.
Ever since, any attempts of logging in normally have been met with a solid black screen and the idle whirring of the CPU fan.
What I have tried
I have tried the recovery mode boot up, but no luck (The log does greet "Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS!"). I tried out each option that seemed useful:
dpkg
goes through the packages as advertised, but strangely enough it always locks up on some Braille package until I doCtrl+C
, at which moment it spouts some error messages and then I think throws me into the normal boot.failsafeX
results in a similar situation to the normal boot: a black void.fsck
says the single partition I have is a-ok.grub
seems to get a bunch of stuff. Don't know if it searches locally or fetches from the internet.network
didn't work I think.
I tried following this answer but couldn't do the sudo
part because the filesystem was mounted as readonly.
So I ran fsck
which mounts as RW and tried again.
This time, after running apt-get autoremove
it went through many packages (Setting up foobar (X.Y.ZubuntuN) ...
), sometimes installing packages, which I assume is the usual behavior. One thing to note though is it kept getting stuck several times, so I had to Ctrl+C
it out of processing the current package. It finally ended on "Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
".
While this question seems to mention some of the graphics problems I've been experiencing... I have Intel HD Graphics, not Nvidia. I'll keep looking into it.