I'm running into this problem on a machine that only runs ubuntu, so I don't have the option of choosing "recovery mode" from a dual-boot situation.

Any ideas on how to fix or work around this?

I'd just wipe the hard drive and start over, but I have a good bit of data I need to get off of there before I do that.

I haven't been able to find a thread that fixes this yet, and I've benn working on it off and on for the past 5 hours.

*It's a pre-built dell that I was able to take from work so I honestly don't know the exact hardware config. It's 2.8 Ghz processor with integrated graphics if that helps at all. *oh and it's a desktop, i suppose that's worth mentioning.

*I've decided to just get a USB to SATA cable and use another live boot disk to get the data to my laptop.

But I probably won't be able to do that til next paycheck so any help will still be appreciated.

After GRUB is loading Ubuntu 9.04 gives you standard two options
1) Standard UBUNtu
2) Ubuntu Recovery mode

Did it come so far ?
And what error message did you get ?

If installation and live CD behave the same, it's probably a hardware recognition thing.

If you know your way around the commandline, the whole rescue operation can be done with one of the excellent CLI based systems out there; Finnix is sufficient in most cases and is very handy to have around in any case; SystemRescueCD has more tools and offers a GUI in addition to having lots of tools available on the CLI. And there are many others.

That said, did you try to use the live CD in "failsafe" mode? I suspect a X issue (hangs on X start, maybe - that could be the reason you don't get proper keyboard support - or a real CLI, really, since it may be visible, but not accessible due to a freeze).

In any case, having a running CLI system gives you all the tools you need to analyse the situation.

M.

I was able to run in recovery mode eventually and now everything is running fine. I'm still not exactly sure what went wrong, though.

Thanks for your help.