Upgrade: No net, no keyboard, no mouse. Broken kernel?

[1clue]

Hi,

I have an xubuntu 13.10 system. I did sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade awhile back, and now the system is broken. I'm just now getting to it to fix it.

For one thing, since I dist-upgraded from 13.04 the useless but prettified boot screen is there, so I can't see boot failures. It just goes to the ubuntu splash screen with a bunch of dots on the screen, and then goes to a login screen as though nothing were wrong.

I can boot from a CD and everything works fine, I have network and keyboard and mouse. It's not broken hardware, although a raid array isn't coming up. I think the CD I'm booting from doesn't have raid drivers. I'm booting from a system rescue cd from probably more than a year back. I choose 'boot existing linux' and it boots to my xubuntu, but with a different kernel I think. I'm getting slow network access, but it's at least network access. I can't use X but I can get to a terminal.

This reminds me of a broken kernel, but I don't recall a kernel coming in. I also don't see much grief about it on the forum, so I guess I'm at a bit of a loss.

This is a virtual machine host, so I don't want to just wipe it.

Since I have it up, I'm trying to update it again in hopes that fixes it. If not I think I'll try to uninstall the kernel and install it again.

Does anyone have input as to the best approach?

Thanks.

[jv69]

FYI: I am having a problem with no mouse functionality. Both occurred on 12.04 and 13.10.

[1clue]

OK, so here's the deal:

I booted off a system rescue cd.
Boot the Linux on the hard disk.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade (this installed a new kernel)
unmount all the mounted filesystems
run repairs on them
remount
eject the CD
reboot.


Edit: This fixes the problem. I guess I didn't mention that.

[1clue]

In the aftermath, I think the key problem was a bad kernel.

I had to pull the plug on the box a few times. The broken filesystems were all XFS, and it doesn't handle power failure very elegantly.