Both UbuntuStudio 16.04 and Windows 7 Ultimate installed.
Machine was working fine till yesterday.
On this morning's boot, I was prompted to run a manual fsck.
This has happened before - perhaps another three times during the last three months.
I ran the fsck on the partition concerned, typed "y", whenever asked to fix an issue, and rebooted. Chose Ubuntu from the GRUB loader (tried both Low Latency and normal), but this time I got to a black screen with an underscore cursor blinking forever.
I found out that ctrl+alt+delete did a reboot.
Tested the recovery option by going into the advanced Ubuntu options (or whatever it's called) from the GRUB menu.
Tried fsck again.
Three errors were detected. System told me I can look at
systemctl status lightdm.service
systemctl status NetworkManager-wait-online.service
and systemctl status snapd.boot-ok.service
for more info.
Checked for damaged packages. None were found.
Thought it might be worth updating GRUB, from within the advanced Ubuntu options menu.
Bad idea.
Now the GRUB menu is gone, every time I reboot I get directly to the same black screen...
I tried ctrl+alt+F2 after reading something somewhere on this forum, and that took me to a kind of text-based interface called tty2.
I provided username and password and I got a few lines long message saying:
usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/release-upgrade-motd: 39: /usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/release-upgrade-motd: cannot create /var/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/release-upgrade-motd: Directory nonexistent
usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-fsck-at-reboot: 33: usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-fsck-at-reboot: cannot create /var/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-fsck-at-reboot: Directory nonexistent
cat: /var/lib/update-notifier/fsck-at-reboot: No such file or directoy
run-parts: /etc/update-motd.d/98-fsck-at-reboot exited with return code 1
Help.
Update
I do have my bootable installation usb still available.
Any ideas as to what I should be looking for from there to have any chance of fixing this?
Update 2
I just checked my partitioning scheme in GParted through my bootable usb, and it turns out the boot flag was gone from my actual boot partition, and had instead appeared on an ntfs-partition I'm using for storage purposes.
I will now remove the flag from the ntfs-part. and put it back on the boot-part. and get back here to report any potential progress, but I would be interested to hear any ideas as to why this may have happened.
Update 3
No progress here. I tried repairing/reinstalling/updating grub, with the help of various threads on this forum and elsewhere, 1st from within the live usb, but with no results, and then from the tty menu, which seem to have made things even worse: When I now boot my machine, I end up with this message, on black background:
Loading Operating System...
error: Imvalid arch-independent ELF-magic...
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>
Any sort of help would be greatly appreciated.
I'm really stuck here.
Solved
Reinstalled Ubuntu.
Deleted my /boot partition and went with one single /root instead.
Kept my ntfs-partition intact.
The GRUB bootloader menu is restored.
Peculiarly enough, however, 2 Win7 loaders have appeared: one on sdc1 (that's the actual Win7 partition on another ssd than the one hosting Ubuntu), and one on sda3, which is just my ntfs-partition that I use for storage purposes.
Wonder why this might have happened... but perhaps I'd better post a new question about it.
If Ctrl+Alt+F2 takes you to console mode, then your system is actually booted. This is good news, because you should have access to your disks, and be able to backup.
To get further information about what prevents your graphical environment to start, try to restart the service, and see if it prints any error log :
As for GRUB, your menu is probably just hidden, you should be able to see it if maintaining up/down arrow key pressed during boot.