Help, its messed up.

[Jim Smith]

I usually can fix most of my own problems, but I am stumped by this one. 
I recently installed Hardy on my laptop after running Gutsy for a long 
time. Hardy was running well until the latest update. Now it appears 
hosed. I cannot get it to boot in normal or recovery mode, using any one 
of the three kernels available. it goes thru the boot sequence 
apparently normally, then drops to the text based screen then stops on 
the line "Starting system log daemon......." Will not boot into a root 
shell either, just keeps cycling back to the login prompt. Of course I 
can always do a complete re-install, but will lose some hard to 
duplicate files. My backup is somewhat out of date. I am quite aware of 
the dangers of putting a development system on, but this is the very 
first time I have had trouble. If I could recover my data, then I can 
re-install Gutsy.


Thank you all,
Jim