Ubuntu 9.10 Fails to Boot After Installing Samba CIFS

[Tom H]

> I have had no end of problems upgrading/installing Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell Inspiron 15n. After using "nomodeset" as an option when booting (the laptop has Intel graphic chips and WILL not display on the LCD or VGA ports unless nomodeset is specified), I finally get a bootable system that displays. (I had been running 9.04 I386.) But after I install samba or some part of samba so I can access windows shares using cifs (which worked fine), the system fails on reboot. Incredibly, it's trying to access the windows shares even though I only do this manually. I have NO idea how it knows the dns names of the shares as I wrote a script to set it up manually when I need it. The script is not run at boot time - I have to manually run it.
>
> Is there any way I can prevent samba from running so I can get the laptop to boot? I don't want to have re-install everything all over again if possible. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Can you boot to recovery-mode and disable whatever samba process you
suspect is preventing you from a normal boot?

(You shouldn't need to install any part of samba to access cifs
shares, only to serve out samba shares.)