I accidentally closed terminal in the middle of an apt-get upgrade; am I screwed?

[Steve the Pocket]

I was told that in order to update a part of Steam that its auto-updater couldn't handle, I should run "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade". Well, I did, not realizing that the latter updates everything on my system to the latest build and that it would take over an hour. So I started doing other stuff while it ran, and then I accidentally closed the Konsole window along with everything else before it was finished. I don't know if it makes any difference that I was using Konsole instead of whatever terminal app Unity has, but either way, did I just ruin my computer?

[arpanaut]

try

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

and see if it completes, if not post the error messages back here for help.

[Steve the Pocket]

It completed. I had interrupted it in the middle of downloading, not unpacking/installing.

But then the system tray prompted me to restart the computer, so I did. And then it froze in the middle of booting up.

Soooooo then I booted into repair mode or whatever it's called from the GRUB menu, and tried to run the package restore thing. It downloaded 30 megs of stuff and then asked if I wanted to remove three packages (y - yes, d - details). I made the mistake of typing d, because then it spat out the name of one package and "[END]" in white on black; I tried pressing Enter, End, and Esc, and I'm pretty sure Down as well, but nothing took me back to the prompt. So I started mashing keys and then the message changed to something I don't remember, and then it really didn't do anything no matter what I pressed. So I did a Ctrl+Alt+Del and now the GRUB menu is completely gone. Instead there's a text prompt that I have no idea how to use, but it probably doesn't matter because clearly I must have hosed it good for even the boot menu to have disappeared.

[Paqman]

What does it say at the prompt? If it's just a regular command prompt then try:

sudo apt-get install -f

If it's a Grub prompt then just reboot and start again. It's unlikely you've completely hosed your system, we should be able to recover it if you're still able to boot up into a command line with networking and run the package manager.

[siddharth007]

Try these commands

apt-get autoclean

apt-get autoremove

Following these two commands,issue this command

apt-get -f install

Hope this helps.

[Steve the Pocket]

Oh hey, the menu did come right back.

Well, after trying the package restore again, I now have a system that boots with a text-mode version of the gray Kubuntu boot screen and goes to black when it hangs instead of just freezing. I tried going into the shell from the recovery menu and entering those three commands, but they all said nothing was changed.

Now what?

EDIT: I tried the package restore one more time as a Hail Mary, and it brought back the graphical boot screen but it still freezes.

[Bashing-om]

Steve the Pocket; Hi !
Let's see if the situation can be narrowed down somewhat - error codes are good -
Post the output of terminal code:

dpkg --audit

which gives a list of unconfigured packages (if any).

hth

[Steve the Pocket]

Nothing.

Is it possible the graphics driver is messed up? I'm using a relatively new AMD legacy driver that I had to install manually with the "force" parameter on because the standard methods of removing fglrx weren't getting everything. I have no idea what trying to do an apt-get upgrade on top of that might do.

[Bashing-om]

Steve the Pocket;
A nothing return is a good thing; means all packages that the package manager is aware of are intact .

To explore your surmise in greater depth, let's load ubuntu up in "recovery mode" See how it likes the onboard "vesa" driver.
Not knowing what version you are running ->just general guidline:
Single operating system:
cold boot, soon as bios screen clears depress and hold shift key -> grub menu
arrow down to "recovery mode" kernel, enter key to activate -> recovery console menu -> "resume normal boot"
GUI login -> username and password -> GUI desk top in degraded graphics ( we hope )
Yeas ? then from the "Additional Drivers" utility see if you can install the recommended driver.
Reboot
.
Maybe all the background grunt work done for us and not required to (un)install the proprietary drivers.

Getting a driver to work with steam ....might be another matter, I just do not know.

we will see what is to be seen

[Steve the Pocket]

No dice. I select "resume normal boot" and after the text scroll I just get a blank screen.