Regular Boot goes to console, but Recovery Mode works fine

[Guest]

Hey guys,

I just upgraded from 8.04 last night, and things went pretty smoothly --only one error I could see and that concerned some msfonts package of some sort, nothing vitally important.

The problem is that boot to kde does not complete. I get the splash screens with the kubuntu progress bar and then, for some reason, the mythbuntu equivalent; but eventually all I end up with is a black screen and a xterm window in the corner, already logged into my account. I have tried to start kdm from there and that does not appear to do anything... I can exit the window ('exit') which takes me to a horrible version of the login screen, input login/password and I am brought back to the xterm window.

This would sound a lot like what I read about graphic driver issues elsewhere in the forum, except that: if I boot into recovery mode and then just tell the system to proceed to normal boot, I get to a login prompt. Enter my login/password, and then start kdm with "sudo kdm", and I get to the proper kde4 login just fine, and then on to the desktop. Everything appears to be working perfectly there, desktop effects are fully on and working and things run smoothly --the only issue is that I have no network support (which, I think, is supposed to be the case?).

I have tried to disable compositing and all desktop effects while in recovery mode and then restart, to no avail. Any ideas?




edit: the machine runs on an intel 945 graphic chip, if that makes any difference. I have also tried to do this and that didn't do anything at all.

[Snowhog]

Re: Regular Boot goes to console, but Recovery Mode works fine

Assuming that this isn't a video issue (Intel GPU), you might have a space issue. Boot into recovery mode. At the prompt, type:

df -hTxtmpfs

You'll get output like this:

Filesystem  Type  Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3   ext3  7.9G 2.8G 4.8G 37% /
/dev/sda7   ext3   20G 6.5G  13G 35% /home
/dev/sdd1   vfat  4.7G  24M 4.7G  1% /media/PC_5G

You are interested in the amount of space listed under Avail on your / partition. If it is at or very nearly at 100%, you will need to do some house cleaning to free up some space.

[Guest]

Re: Regular Boot goes to console, but Recovery Mode works fine

Nope, plenty of space on both the system and home partition...

I thought about it some more and I figured it must have been a conflict between graphic packages. I upgraded from KDE3, I had bits of gnome installed too and I'm pretty sure I modified the login to use gnome themes at some point in the past... So, I suppose it was a bit of a mess for the updater.

I bit the bullet and wiped the system partition this evening and reinstalled from the liveCD, and now things are happily running. So, problem solved as far as that goes. Now begins the fun of reinstalling everything else.

Thanks for your suggestion though Snowhog, I appreciate it.