thanais
October 10th, 2015, 11:14 AM
Hello everyone.
I am in a serious deadend. My computer after login shows only the background, without Unity and nothing else except for 30 "report problem" windows.
Yesterday morning though it did show the Unity and everything but it did not respond. The graphics were obviously not working and it could not even open my Home file.
The problem is that I cannot apply any of the solutions I find on the web. Ctrl+Alt+F1 (or any other fn) is not openning a terminal so that I can execute commands. Except for that one time that (if I remember correctly) Ctrl+Alt+F7 opened a terminal (black, fullscreen). Also failsafe mode in recovery mode does not work.
I suspect it has to do either with my NVIDIA GeForce 840M graphics card or just with the unity.
The computer is a DELL Inspiron 15 3542 laptop with Intel i7 and the above mentioned graphics. The graphics have long had problems with the nouveau drivers, showing up a message like "nouveau failed..." or something like that, everytime before login screen.
To sum up:
- What do you think the problem is?
- How can I open a terminal and execute commands? (I have only tried root shell prompt in recovery mode and a terminal using live cd Try Ubuntu, but I could not do much)
- How can I backup my files, if I am to make a clean install? I have separate partition for root, swap and home. Will a clean install leave my files in home untouched?
I am in a serious deadend. My computer after login shows only the background, without Unity and nothing else except for 30 "report problem" windows.
Yesterday morning though it did show the Unity and everything but it did not respond. The graphics were obviously not working and it could not even open my Home file.
The problem is that I cannot apply any of the solutions I find on the web. Ctrl+Alt+F1 (or any other fn) is not openning a terminal so that I can execute commands. Except for that one time that (if I remember correctly) Ctrl+Alt+F7 opened a terminal (black, fullscreen). Also failsafe mode in recovery mode does not work.
I suspect it has to do either with my NVIDIA GeForce 840M graphics card or just with the unity.
The computer is a DELL Inspiron 15 3542 laptop with Intel i7 and the above mentioned graphics. The graphics have long had problems with the nouveau drivers, showing up a message like "nouveau failed..." or something like that, everytime before login screen.
To sum up:
- What do you think the problem is?
- How can I open a terminal and execute commands? (I have only tried root shell prompt in recovery mode and a terminal using live cd Try Ubuntu, but I could not do much)
- How can I backup my files, if I am to make a clean install? I have separate partition for root, swap and home. Will a clean install leave my files in home untouched?