going from 14.04 LTS to 16.04.1

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 17:19:54 -0700, Pastor JW wrote:
>The computer won't boot.  It won't connect to anything either
>anymore. I can get a cli but it can't seem to find any commands that
>work so nothing so far has done anything.  I answered all questions as
>will as I could by typing in what came up on the stricken computer's
>screen into another computer which still can connect to the network.
>Copy and paste doesn't work from computer to computer.

Did you read any Ubuntu help pages about trouble shooting? And after
doing this, did you e.g. chroot using a live media?

You could get the output of commands by redirecting them to a file on
e.g. an USB storage device, e.g. an USB stick or an USB HDD.

  command > /mnt/path/to/your_usb_device/command_output.txt

Log files simply could be copied, even without the need to chroot

  cp /var/log/path/to/some_logfile.log /mnt/path/to/your_usb_device/

You even could transform binary systemd log files to text log files.

  strings /var/log/path/to/some_binary_logfile.log > /mnt/path/to/your_usb_device/some_transformed_logfile.txt

Regards,
Ralf