I have 64-bit Linux Mint 18.3 running on an HP 250 G6 laptop.

It normally boots to a desktop with a login prompt.

Yesterday, in an attempt to install a printer, I installed hplip and printer-driver-hpijs. Afterward, the system appeared normal, but still no printer.

Today the computer will only boot to the command prompt with / mounted readonly. If I remount / rw the desktop starts immediately and the system appears normal again.

What issues might cause / to be mounted ro? Disk problems?

When booting, after pressing ESC to see what's happening, I see several [FAILED] message scroll past too fast to read. The last one still visible says hostname.service start failed.

With /etc/inittab no longer used, how do I stop the screen from being cleared before the login prompt is displayed?

Thenks,
clueless

Have you tried booting into emergency mode?

A web search for "mint emergency mode" will turn up a number of articles; I did not feel competent to pick a particular link to suggest.

As regards the printer, installing hplip does not automatically install the printer. You must run either the HPLIP GUI (hp-toolbox on the command line) or the hp-setup command.

If the root is "ro", the OP is in a recovery shell. This is usually filesystem errors, and fstab has "errors=remount-ro". If it keeps happening, look for disk errors.
Mint uses systemd, but the journal is forwarded to a bunch of logs so the users never need to know - see /var/log/ - kern.log and/or syslog would be a good start. The current log is also in journald - try this for a synopsis.

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Thanks.

I checked /etc/fstab and found that I had accidentally deleted the entry for / when I added lines for nfs mounts.

Once I restored it, the computer boots to desktop normally.