Oh Snap. Ubuntu 11.10 update – No boot.

October 7th, 2011 was one of “those” mornings. I went ahead and allowed all the updates in the update package manager to download and be applied. It was an overcast and cloudy day. The forecast was for rain and thunderstorms in the evening. I should have known….

I initiated a restart, some old Microsoft Windows are hard to break, and went to get a cup of coffee. Upon returning I was at the Ubuntu boot screen with the five dots, but the dots were not moving. Curiously I thought, inits are being built or something so I let it go for another 10 minutes. No joy.

After attempting to go to a console window (CTRL-ALT-F1) and still not being able to get a response, I powered off and restarted. That failed to boot further. Finally I decided to enter recovery-mode.

Upon powering up and following the BIOS screen, I held down the SHIFT key until the Grub loader menu appeared. Then I selected the recovery-mode option. This at least brought me to the recovery menu. So, long story short, I was able to determine that there was a failure during init during “load fallback graphics devices”. This got me thinking that something in the xorg.conf might be hosed. I recalled that a few days before I had saved some new settings to the config file from the NVidia setting application to account for a unique, temporary configuration. This was the first time I had rebooted since making those changes.

In the interest of at least getting booted, I moved the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak while in the recovery shell having also mounted the system volume read/write. My hope was to get the “bad” settings out of the way and hopefully some defaults would get loaded. A quick reboot later and I was greeted with the nice LightDM login screen and now able to login.

Hopefully this “emergency” work-around can help someone else in a similar boat.

Blessings!

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