tried upgrading to 12.10 from 12.04, black screen, ctrl+alt+detele doesn't work

[Dax9108]

I am a complete beginner.

after installing/deleting everything for the upgrade, the computer tried to restart and eventually lands at a black screen with a static white cursor in the top left corner.

I tried control alt delete, nothing happens. tried control alt f1 and still nothing happens. tried typing in login and password anyway. nothing. is there anything else I can try?

do I have to wipe it clean and re-install? is there any way to preserve what's on my hard drive now?

[gifford]

First of all, could you provide some information about your computer? Are you running 64 bit version?
Also, why 12.10? It is no longer supported.
The new long term support version is 14.04 and is really quite nice.

[Dax9108]

thank you for answering!

Re: hardware, I'm not sure what matters. my computer is a Toshiba satellite l505-s6955, with Pentium dual core processor. I replaced the hard drive before installing Ubuntu the first time. does that matter?

I want to upgrade to 14.04 -- the instructions I read said the way to do that is by upgrading to each version one at a time until I get there, though since i've had this problem i've read conflicting information on this site.

don't remember about 64 or 32 bit. and can't check since the black screen.

[gifford]

It probably is 64 bit capable.
As far as the upgrade sequence, the information was incorrect.
Is the install to be just Ubuntu or are you doing a dual with windows?
I would suggest you download and try installing 14.04 64 bit. It should work a lot better for you.
If you have no other computer available, you could reinstall 12.04 and then download 14.04.

[Dax9108]

just Ubuntu.
if I want to avoid wiping my hard drive, would it work to boot 12.04 from my flash drive then make some kind of changes from there?

[gifford]

I may have incorrectly read your first post...I thought you had tried to do a new install of 12.10 by wiping the hard drive.
Did you back up any of the files you wanted to keep?
In my experience, I always done a fresh install of the new version saving the files I wanted to keep by backing them up before doing the new installation.
At this point, I am unsure of what the damage is or how it could be fixed.
The only recommendation I have is to try a new fresh install of 14.04.
Others may be able to help you more.