[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks Dennis. I should've mentioned this as a potential clue. When I did the upgrade from 15.10 to 16.04LTS I got through the entire update fine. The last thing to do was to reboot. So I clicked on reboot. Well, when I did nothing happened. It wasn't like a normal reboot at all. The screen just went blank. And stayed blank. For maybe 2 or 3 minutes. After that time had elapsed I thought the computer had powered off (it had not) and so I pressed the power button,thinking I was turning it on.

I wonder if that may have had something to do with the subsequent problems.

Possible.

I encountered something like that on an older machine. I did a version upgrade from a version of Ubuntu to a later one. The upgrade process went normally. Things went to Hell in a bucket when I rebooted.

The problem was that the new kernel required PAE support, and the ancient notebook (a Fujitsu p2110) I was installing to didn't have it. So the new kernel didn't install.

What I got when I booted was an unusable system, and the symptoms were video related. If I booted to a command line, all was well. If I tried to use a GUI, I was hosed.

What I wound up doing was wiping the Ubuntu slice and reinstalling from scratch, carefully stopping before that version upgrade. There wasn't anything on the Ubuntu slice I needed to preserve, so it was a viable (if time consuming) alternative.

(I sent a nastygram to Ubuntu recommending that if the upgrade required stuff like PAE support, it should test for that and abort if not present as the first thing it did. I think the Ubuntu devs never imagined someone might try the upgrade on older kit that didn't support it.)

The Fujitsu was a pass along from a friend who upgraded, but loved the old machine, and didn't want to just throw it out. I used it as a test bed to see what performance I could wring from ancient hardware without throwing money at it. The big limitation was 256MB RAM, which the Transmeta Crusoe CPU grabbed 16MB off the top of for "code morphing". It came to me with WinXP SP2 installed and took 8 minutes to simply boot. Actually doing anything once it had took longer. No surprise. XP wants 512MB RAM minimum. I reformatted, repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS in a multi-boot config.

I originally installed Xubuntu, which installed without a hitch but was still snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums said that too much Gnome had crept into XFCE, and that Ubuntu had a steadily advancing idea of what "low end" was. They recommended what I did: wipe and install from the 10MB Minimal CD, to get a working command line installation, then use apt-get to pick and choose what I wanted. Installing LXDE, a specifically light-weight GUI package, brought the Xorg stuff needed to use a GUI as a dependency. The result, installed on an ext4 file system, was still no speed demon but was usable. Puppy was designed for low end kit, and also worked fairly well. Win2K Pro worked a little better than Linux, after I took everything I could out of the Startup configuration. (The big win was turning off the Windows Update service, since Win2K would no longer get any. It saved me a SVCHOST.EXE process and 10MB RAM.) FreeDOS flew.

The other issue with that box was a slow IDE4 HD, and that was a BIOS limitation that swapping in a faster drive wouldn't fix. Large programs took forever to load. I didn't even try to run current Firefox, It would take 45 seconds to load and be perceptibly sluggish once up

It was fun to play with and tweak, but I had other machines where the real work got done. I haven't even turned it on in months.

This is my first experience with the grub boot menu. I've never had more than one OS, never dual booted, so usually I just turn on the power switch and the computer boots up.

With only one OS, yeah, I suppose it would behave like that.

When I simply push the power button the computer does not boot. Period.

This is how I go about starting the computer.

1) I turn on the monitor
2) I push the power button.
3) As the DDR3 and Slave/Master stuff starts coming on I hold down the Shift key.

Tell me more? I don't see those here, and don't recall ever seeing them.

4) Eventually the grub boot menu appears
5) I choose the 'advanced options'
6) There I see my three kernels (including 'upstart' and 'recovery' versions)
7) I arrow down to the 15.10 version
8) I hit the Enter key
9) The computer comes on (and in less than 2 minutes)

What do you have on the machine you need to preserve? I strongly suspect your best option is also "Wipe and redo from scratch". I think a 16.04 LTS installed from scratch might work but that's just a guess. If not, go for th previous 15.04 LTS release, and stay put.

Normally I don't see a grub screen. Or at least I've never noticed it. And now, thank goodness for the grub screen because it let's me choose the 15.10 kernel as the two 16.04 kernels don't boot.

What, if anything, happens if you try?
______
Dennis