Hi all,

Thanks for your advice.

I suppose the problem orignated from Ubuntu, the previous packages for update and upgrade. I have 2 PCs, a daily working PC and a spare PC, both running Ubuntu desktop 12.04, 64bit. Both got problem after running update and upgrade previously. I have been spending nearly a week trying to fix the problem witout result.

On the spare PC I have another HD, a spare HD, with Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) installed several years back. The OS has been upgraded regularily. Yesterday I booted this HD. On running update and upgrade with apt-get;

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgradeThen I ran
$ sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude upgrade

It went through without complaint. After reboot it works without problem. The kernel "is 3.2.0-57-generic x86_64" (see attached screenshot"). It clarifies the doubt on hardware problem.


Now I'm prepared to wipe out the Ubuntu OS on both PCs. On the spare PC I'll install Debian 7.2 as host and download/install VirtualBox, the latest version. On the working PC I'll install Ubuntu 12.04.3 as host and install VirtualBox download on Ubuntu repo. Otherwise I don't know whether I can finally fix the existing problem on both PCs. Neither I can forecast how many days I'll further spend for sorting out the problem.

The only remaining problem is to find enough space for storing about 500G data including the VM images on both PCs. I'll sorted out this problem later.

Anyway, lot of thanks for your help.

Rgds
satims

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Hi again,

I have one more idea what may be causing your issues. I wonder if you added some PPA's that are causing your packages to conflict.
A couple that I can think of are 'xorg-edgers' and sometimes even 'X Updates'. Maybe you want to check your PPA's, see if they all update. You could also post your sources list here and some of the guys here might know if there is a conflict somewhere.

Just a heads up though, simply removing the PPA out of the list will not fix any issue. A good utility for fixing PPA issues is 'ppa-purge'.

Hope you can fix this, instead of having to reinstall everything. On a machine that had been running for many years that will be a big undertaking. I would strongly suggest not reusing the same harddrive, but putting your original aside and using it as a backup to reference back to. This is easier now too, since large harddrives are fairly inexpensive nowadays.

Hi all,

After copying all data to the spare HD I made a last check on user accounts to see whether there are data which I haven't copied. I can't remember exactly how many users have been created in the past because this box was built >5 year ago.

On -> System Settings -> User Accounts
I found the user-satimis was locked. After unlocking it the menu bars, top and side, come back. I have rebooted the PC several times including shutdown making sure it works.

It is quite strange to me running update and upgrade will cause locking the administrator's account.

Rgds
satimis

Glad you figured it out.