attempted upgrade to 16.04; black login screen, unknown username

[deloric]

Hello,

I was notified of the 16.04 update the other day and tried to update. After a while it froze, so I restarted my machine, and now when I turn it on it comes to a black screen asking for a login and password. I have no idea what my login would be. I tried to boot my windowsXP but that just brought me to the same black screen. Is there a way to figure out what my login username is? I'm not very techie.

Thanks for any help

Tracey

[steeldriver]

Your home directory name will almost always be the same as your username, so one way to find it is to boot to recovery mode (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecoveryMode) and then type



ls /home


in the root shell (there is no need to remount the filesystem - you can skip that step)

[deloric]

I tried booting in recovery mode but the same screen asking for login and password just comes up. It won't let me type anything different in there - just says its an invalid login.

[steeldriver]

When you get to the Advanced Menu, you should be able to use the arrow keys to select "Drop to root shell"

270589

Press the TAB key to select <OK>, then you should see a message



Press Enter for maintenance
(or press Control-D to continue)


Press Enter and you should get a root shell



root@machine-name:~#


into which you can type



ls /home


270590

[deloric]

I can't get to the advanced menu. I choose to boot from advanced menu, then it gives me a long list of options, half of which have (recovery mode) after them. "ubuntu, with linux 3.13.0-(# between 32 and 92)-generic" I've chosen multiple recovery modes, and it runs through a long script of text and then that black logon screen comes up. It says "ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS tracey-eM250 tty1" "tracey-eM250 login:"

[grahammechanical]

If the upgrade froze and you switched off you may need to do a fresh install of Ubuntu 16.04. That may be the best option for you for you may now have a broken installation.

If you were able to get to the recovery menu by selecting a recovery mode kernel, then we may be able to suggest some commands that may complete the upgrade. But you cannot get to the recovery menu.

Regards

[deloric]

Okay; thats what I was thinking I might have to do. Thankfully I just did a backup a few weeks ago when I resized my partitions. Thanks for the help everybody.

[steeldriver]

FYI if you have unsaved data (since your last backup) then you should be able to mount your broken system from a live CD / USB and copy it off - there should be no need to lose anything