Kubuntu 11.10 won'1t boot after upgrade.

Thu Apr 26 08:19:47 UTC 2012

On Thursday 26 April 2012 06:53:05 Errol Sapir wrote:
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>     <p>Hi Steve </p>
>     <p>The same thing happened to me when upgrading to 12.04. I posted a
>       thread explaining what I did. I am copying it here. Maybe it can
>       help you.</p>
>     <p>[...]

HTML and top-posting?

It's clearly not a grub error. If it were, the boot process wouldn't even 
start. What you need now is to know where it goes wrong.

Always, always remove the "quiet splash" options. It's the first thing I do 
after a fresh installation. In this case, you might be able to set them by 
chrooting from a LiveCD.

Why? Well, that nice beautiful splash screen hides from you what you want to 
know. There's a warning? You won't see it. A daemon doesn't start? You won't 
know. Because Ubuntu lacks boot logging since the switch to upstart [1] many 
years ago, it can be hard to find out what went wrong during the boot process.

This is what you do (as root):
- Edit */etc/default/grub*
- Change the line
  /GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"/
  to
  /GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""/
- Run *update-grub*

Yes, this will put text back on your console. It might nog look as pretty as a 
bar jumping from left to right and back, but it is slightly more useful and 
should be the default setting.

Maybe someone can post a link with some explanation of how to get into a 
chrooted environment to do this? I didn't find one. It should go like this:
- Boot a LiveCD
- mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
  (if sda1 contains your root filesystem and /boot. Maybe more is required.)
- mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
- mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
- chroot /mnt /bin/bash

While your disk is mounted, take a look at /mnt/var/log/boot.log

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/328881
    (seems to be fixed now)