16.04.1 upgrade from 14.04 boots to black screen.

[Rammatamago]

I got the 16.04.1 upgrade notice and started it through terminal with do-release-upgrade. It threw a lot of dpkg errors near the end, but said the update was complete despite the errors. I tried to sort out the errors before restarting, and somewhere along the way running apt-get autoremove was suggested (I think after running apt-get update && apt-get upgrade). After that I opened update manager to see if things were okay, and all it said was that a restart was needed. On restart rub tries to boot to the new kernel, but doesn't do anything besides showing a black screen. Selecting the previous kernel (3.16.7-031607) drops straight to a command prompt.

Starting the previous kernels recovery mode works, so I ran dpkg repair which gives confusing output.



Calculating the changes

The software on this computer is up to date.

There are no upgrades available for your system. The upgrade will now be canceled.

Do you want to start the upgrade?

Continue [yN] Details[d]


Details shows nothing. Saying yes throws dpkg errors that look the same as what happened at the end of the initial release-upgrade, which consist of many variations of



dpkg: error processing package <package name> (--configure:
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of <package name>:
<package name> depends on <second package name>; however:
<second package name> is not configured yet.


The packages included are


udev
gnome-bluetooth
ubuntu-minimal
bluez
unetbootin
indicator-bluetooth
python3-checkbox-support
python3-checkbox-ng
pulseaudio
plainbox-provider-checkbox
mountall
unity-control-center
initramfs-tools-core
alsa-base
lvm2
libcanderra-pulse:amd64
pulseaudio-module-x11
libsolid4
initramfs-tools
udisks2
plainbox-provider-resource-generic
upower
xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse
plasma-workspace
xserver-xorg-core
media-player-info
xserver-xorg-video-radeon
unity-control-center-signon
plymouth
xserver-xorg
indicator-power
okular
network-manager
ubuntu-drivers-common
kdelibs5-plugins
xserver-xorg-video-vesa
checkbox-converged
gnome-user-share
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
software-properties-gtk
nvidia-361
xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu
indicator-sound
rhythmbox
ubuntu-desktop
gnome-disk-utility
xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
lightdm
xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
upstart
gnome-session-bin


Most of which seem rather important. My hunch is that running apt-get autoremove when it was recommended caused this problem.

What I've tried so far includes these

dpkg --configure -a Which gives the same dependency errors and package list as above.

apt-get update Which only checks 4 sources, all us.archive.com/ubuntu for xenial (security, InRelease, updates, backports).

do-release-upgrade Which finds no new releases.

apt-get install -f Which gives the same sort of dpkg errors, and gives a "E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)"


Past that, I'm at a loss for how to fix this, and my google-fu isn't finding others with as many packages missing. Let me know if there's other info that could narrow down the problem.

[waterwingz]

This might not explain your problem (and I didn't try to follow if / how you messed up your packages ) but there have been several reports of systems booting to blank screens and being unresponsive after upgrading to 16.04 LTS. The problem seems to relate to a failure of the update to get the video drivers setup properly.

Try booting 16.04 using the recovery option in the advanced setting of the grub startup. If that works, adding

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset"

to /etc/default/grub seems to solve the problem. Or at least it did for me and several other people.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2322410

or google for mythbuntu 16.04 only boots in recovery mode site:ubuntuforums.org

[kansasnoob]

The two most critical packages i see on that list are 'ubuntu-minimal' and 'xserver-xorg-core'. So from recovery mode, or maybe better yet from TTY after a freeze at black screen (just press Ctrl+Alt+F1) and try:


sudo apt-get install ubuntu-minimal


sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core

Then post the results (a picture of the screen would probably suffice).

Basically each one will show some other package that can't be installed/upgraded, so keep repeating that and you might narrow it down to a common culprit.