NEW - Problem After Updates

[NoEyedDeer]

Hi All,

I am still a fairly new Linux convert.
I was bobbing along fine and dandy for 6 months but we seem to have had an awful lot of updates this week and the last one killed my computer.
I now can't get it to boot at all and can't generate anything on my screen, my computer just whirrs away as if it is trying but it gets nowhere.
I think there was a Radeon update in there this week, I don't know if that is something to do with it, as I have quite an old model.
Anybody got any ideas?
How do I get it started again?

Thanks

[SecretCode]

Do you know what version of Kubuntu you were running?

Do you get a GRUB menu during boot up? If not, you should be able to make it appear by holding down Shift - as soon as you've powered up but after the BIOS splash screen if any.

If you can get to the GRUB menu you should be able to boot into recovery mode and then we can investigate things at the command line.

[NoEyedDeer]

Cheers.
I am going to try now.
It is Trusty Tahr 14.04 - KDE
From memory I think it was the last update that was quite small to undue unnecessary previous patches that did it. 3 lots of libnss or something like that

[NoEyedDeer]

I think like mentioned elsewhere since these Jan updates, it hasn't actually shut down properly.

[SecretCode]

I now can't get it to boot at all and can't generate anything on my screen, my computer just whirrs away as if it is trying but it gets nowhere.

While you're looking at starting in recovery mode, can we get a better idea of what "gets nowhere" means?
Do you get a BIOS splash screen (if not, we would be looking at a hardware problem!)
Do you get a GRUB menu
Do you get the pulsing K and/or any text messages on the screen
Do you get as far as the Kubuntu login screen

[NoEyedDeer]

If I left the PC for hour or so after switching off then I could just about get half the BIOS splash screen at the start. But it wouldn't progress much beyond that.
No Grub menu
No pulsing Kubuntu
Eventually, I managed to get the Xpress recovery key to work and rolled it back to the previous version of linux 13.13 0-44 or something like that and everything started up and worked fine. I managed to suspend and restart it but once it was switched off it was back to not working again.
I am not sure it was responding to the keyboard as the boot key didn't work at all.

wfjm seemed to be having a similar problem but regarding the keyboard:https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...rnel-3-13-0-45

I guess I need to completely remove the last update. How do I do that?

Thanks

[Snowhog]

I'm going to guess here, that you might simply have a space problem. Reboot into recovery mode (console login), and afterwards, type:
df -hT --exclude-type=tmpfs --exclude-type=devtmpfs
You'll get output similar to this:

Filesystem     Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5      ext4   25G  5.9G   18G  26% /
/dev/sda6      ext4  197G   46G  142G  25% /home

What you are interested in is the percentage of space in use on the root partition. If it is over 95%, you have house-cleaning to do.

[NoEyedDeer]

Cheers Snowhog, had a go but that's not the problem. Only 39% is used, so there is plenty of space.

Is it possible to remove the last change?

[SecretCode]

If I left the PC for hour or so after switching off then I could just about get half the BIOS splash screen at the start. But it wouldn't progress much beyond that.
No Grub menu
No pulsing Kubuntu
Eventually, I managed to get the Xpress recovery key to work and rolled it back to the previous version of linux 13.13 0-44 or something like that and everything started up and worked fine. I managed to suspend and restart it but once it was switched off it was back to not working again.
I am not sure it was responding to the keyboard as the boot key didn't work at all.
...

This is not what I'd expect from a failed update. If you are really not getting the full BIOS screen you may have a hardware error (such as a non-responding USB drive ... but not just a full drive. Or an overheating problem. Or faulty RAM. Or a bad power connection).
Could you post a photo of the "half BIOS splash screen"?

Very odd that GRUB won't even come up. Again, that's not going to be fixed just by removing the last update, it would need reinstalling GRUB.
Can you boot from a boot DVD/USB?

Also ... I don't know of any way to remove the last update without having disk snapshots!

[NoEyedDeer]

Hi,

From recovery mode, I managed to get it to boot normally (Linux 13.13 0-45) and all was working but it turns out that with this update, if I don't actively put it into Suspend, it just hangs there and doesn't shut down like others have mentioned.

I am waiting to get back in and will also try dvd boot as well.

Cheers