[SOLVED] Destroyed Xubuntu attempting to upgrade

Yuhan · 08-25-2016, 04:23 PM

I'm feeling really dumb folks. I was trying to upgrade to Xubuntu 16.04 and something went really wrong. I can now no longer even get into my system. They want a "login" name which I've long forgotten and also my password which I know well. I have never been asked for login name before. I can't get to a terminal to put whoami in there. What can I do??

Emerson · 08-25-2016, 04:33 PM

Boot in single user mode or from a liveCD/USB an peek into /home, your user directory is named after your user.

Yuhan · 08-25-2016, 04:44 PM

Emerson, can you explain a bit more? I am stuck in both Recovery Mode and Regular Mode at the "login" prompt. I do not recall my original name as I never use it. This is a Lenovo ThinkPad T400. To get a live cd what is the best way to do that? I've downloaded Xubuntu 16.04 from a torrent. How do I transfer to a disc or flash drive?

Emerson · 08-25-2016, 04:56 PM

I do not use *buntus myself, but I did a search for you.

Yuhan · 08-25-2016, 05:09 PM

I appreciate the search but this is much worse. I simply can't get past this command, no matter what I do. Maybe the best thing is to use a Live CD of Xubuntu 16.04 and trouble shoot from there. What is the best way to download and burn a Live CD? I don't burn disks that often...

Emerson · 08-25-2016, 05:55 PM

Quote:

I simply can't get past this command, no matter what I do.

What command?

Yuhan · 08-25-2016, 05:59 PM

login: [cursor]

Emerson · 08-25-2016, 06:00 PM

When you boot in single user mode there will be no login prompt, you will be logged in as root, no password asked. You didn't read any of those search results, did you?

colorpurple21859 · 08-25-2016, 06:51 PM

You can see what you home folder is called, from grub if you know what drive/partition your installation is on. at the grub menu hit c for the grub command line then

Code:

ls (hd0,1)/home

or something similar where hd0 is your drive counting from zero and 1 is the number of the partition your system is on counting from one.

Yuhan · 08-25-2016, 08:01 PM

But that's the point...I cannot get to grub or anything else because I'm literally locked out of my system. What you're saying would be great if I could somehow access a terminal, but I can't. Thanks for that suggestion, though.

colorpurple21859 · 08-25-2016, 08:10 PM

you don't get the grub menu, when you first turn on the computer? What do you get/see? how did you get to a login screen?

Emerson · 08-25-2016, 08:15 PM

Another search for you.

Yuhan · 08-25-2016, 09:04 PM

Okay...very good. Thank you Emerson. Now, the question is: once I get an active prompt by using the word "single" as described, what can I do to correct this situation? I tried running sudo apt-get dist-upgrade; sudo apt-get upgrade; and sudo apt-get update, but this didn't do anything to correct the situation. Once I did sudo reboot, I got back to the same "login" prompt. But at least there is some progress here, thank you. What do you recommend from here?

Yuhan · 08-25-2016, 09:09 PM

When I first turn on the computer I see:

Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS [user]-ThinkPad-T400 tty1
[user]ThinkPad-T400 login: [prompt]

That's what I see when I first turn it on. I
have to do a control+alt+delete to get back
to startup and hold down "Shift" to get
into recovery mode to perform the operations
described to get in as single user.

Yuhan · 08-25-2016, 09:21 PM

Ah! Now it appears I can no longer get in as single user. Even when I do a control+alt=delete I still come back to the "login." I can't get back to that grub page where I added "single."