Installation interrupted, reinstall attempt goes to black screen

[james152]

My problem comes with a long story. It started when I was upgrading from 14.04 to 14.10. After the upgrade, I tried to reboot, but I wasn't able to boot. I researched the issue and found out that this issue is common after an upgrade and that most people just reinstall from usb. This was working so I let it sit so the installer could do its thing, but while I was waiting someone smacked the usb drive, which interrupted the install and evidently damaged the usb drive.

I then created a new boot stick using an older computer. I was able to use the boot stick on that computer, but the other computer was not able to boot the gui. Some features are present (loads to minimal BASH comand line which can be used to access the boot menu) but when at the boot menu, trying to load from the hard disc brings me back to the command line where I started and trying to load from usb leads me to the ubuntu pre-boot menu (the one with options to try or install ubuntu), but trying to use any option from that menu results in a blank screen. The screen is backlit, but does not display anything. No color, no cursor, no text or graphics, and it never progresses beyond that.

This must have something to do with the install that was interrupted. I assume that I need to format the hard drive and start from scratch but I don't know how to do that from minimal BASH. Any help or ideas are appreciated.

[v3.xx]

I hope your installing 15.04; 14.10 reaches end of life this month.

[Bucky Ball]

I hope your installing 15.04; 14.10 reaches end of life this month.

In fact, next week. Seen a few posts about people upgrading from a perfectly functional and stable long-term support release to 14.10 recently. :-k

Welcome. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Any specific reason to upgrade or just for the heck of it? 14.04 LTS is supported until April 2019. 15.04 is an interim and is supported until January 2016 at which time you'll need to upgrade to 15.10 (and then 16.04 LTS when you can).

The choice is yours. Reinstall 14.04, or we'll see if we can fix it, or clean install 15.04 and upgrade again in January. Good luck.

PS: Your problems could be generated by installing in UEFI mode with secureboot set to on in the BIOS. If you have Windows installed in EFI, you need to install Ubuntu in EFI mode with secureboot off. Frankly, not much point in giving a lot of support for 14.10, but we can give it our best shot if you're trying to resurrect 14.04 LTS without a clean install.

If you haven't done much on the machine since installing, a clean install would probably be, well, cleaner.