So I replaced my motherboard, cpu, memory and graphics card in my machine that's dual-booting Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 7. After installing all the new hardware, I can't get into either OS. Windows just bluescreens after it does the little windows loading logo thing. Ubuntu will load and go to the login screen. The first time I started it up after the new hardware, it gave me some error messages (white text on black screen before unity loaded) that said something about not being able to read usb ports (this only showed up the first time I loaded ubuntu after changing hardware). Makes sense to me since I don't have motherboard drivers yet. It's also missing video drivers for the new card (understandably) as everything is lo-res once unity loads.

So the login screen comes up and, after digging up a ps2 keyboard, I can switch between users and type in my password, but when I do it freezes up. It's just my background with the "Ubuntu 14.04 LTS" watermark in the bottom left. I can Ctrl+Alt+F2 into a CLI, but I don't know what to do once I get there. I tried to install video drivers through the command line, but I don't have internet (presumably because I don't have mobo drivers). And even if I could get into my account I don't know how I'm going to get the mobo drivers since they're on a CD and my only optical drive is IDE which isn't supported by my new mobo.

So any advice about how to move forward would be awesome. I still have all the old hardware, so I can put it all back and boot up if I need to do that to manipulate things to fix the issue.

edit: just in case, here's the new hardware:
gigabyte 990FXA-UD3
AMD FX 8320
2x8GB Corsair Vengeance ddr3 1866mhz (running at 1300, which is something else I need to look into)
gigabyte geforece gtx 970

Since your hardware is pretty new, i would recomend that you upgrade to latest version of ubuntu.

Before that try to enter in console to get alternative DE that may work.

When trying to install lxde I get the following:
I don't have internet, so I wouldn't expect this to work anyway.

Also, 14.04 is the latest LTS version of Ubuntu. What were you suggesting I upgrade to? http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/

i was suggesting 14.10 or even 15.04 daily build. However you have 14.10 right under 14.04 on link you provided.

It's most likely the kernel in Ubuntu only built kernel for the other mobo. You will have to get a live-cd & rebuild the kernel. As far as windows it may not be as easy.

What models of the 2 mobo's? If it makes any difference Ubuntu may allow for a repair install. With windows you can do the same but call ms support first so they can re-register Os to new mobo.

The current mobo is the Gigabyte 990fxa-ud3. The old one is an ASRock A770DE. If this is a kernel issue, can I rebuild it from command line in recovery mode? How would I do that? I've never done anything like that I don't think. I can't use a live cd because my dvd drive is IDE and my new mobo is sata only.

You don't rebuild the kernel, but you might need to rebuild the initramfs (aka initrd), which gets loaded at boot, and must have the requisite drivers for the kernel to load the root filesystem. You can also have extra drivers in there, and in the (hard) disk system - the latter is probably what needs updating, but we (I) don't know what's needed.

Best thing to do on the new system is to boot a liveUSB - do you have another system (laptop ?) you can create the liveUSB on ?. Else go annoy a mate for a while - they can be created on Windoze in need.
Boot that and prove the hardware is supported - including the video and wifi; Ubuntu calls it extra drivers or something similar. At which point you can be confident a new install should work with all the necessary drivers in place. I also have a long cat5 cable I can run back to the router if I really need to get a wifi driver from the web. Has happeneed a couple of times.

I would do a complete re-install - even of the LTS if its liveUSB works ok. For this to work (best) you need the /home on a separate partition - you can arrange all that from the liveUSB in need. Then re-install, and point /home to the separate partition - don't format it during install. Make sure you use the same user name(s) and password(s), and the installer should fix it all up. You'll need to re-instal packages as needed.
Always used to work for me when I used Ubuntu, but that was a while back.

I've gotten everything running successfully. Here's a breakdown of what I did.

First of all, the USB not working:
It turns out it was only the 2.0 slots. And it's a problem that's specific to the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 motherboard I bought. Simply enabling IOMMU in BIOS fixed the issue.

Once I got USB I was still having the issue of everything hanging after logging in. So I went back to my original hardware. Everything worked perfectly. So then I replaced just the graphics card. Popped in the new Gigabyte Geforce 970 and went into linux. I had a few hiccups installing the nvidia provided drivers, but after going with the latest beta (346.16) and enabling 32-bit compatibility (since I'm running 64-bit ubuntu I didn't do that at first, but steam got upset since it's 32-bit) I got it working nicely.

Then I was able to install the motherboard, new cpu and new ram without many issues.

For anyone using this motherboard under ubuntu, this newegg review provides some great troubleshooting tips: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Single...20141203160146

Thanks for the help, all.