Quote Originally Posted by David_Leigh View Post
So I got to the GRUB menu. I have tried a couple of options such as 'drop to the shell' option which of course then comes up with the command line. The generic Ubuntu notes give advice on the command required to get it out of readonly mode but nothing beyond this. Clearly for people who know their command lines. I also tried the 'failsafeX' mode. This went to a command line.
In Recovery Mode the first thing you must do is select Enable networking. That not only enables networking but mounts the file systems in read/write mode which is necessary to do anything. You'll be asked for confirmation so just select yes and then you'll be returned to the menu again so select Drop to root shell. From there you'll need to run some commands to try and recover. It may be necessary to repeat these in no specific order as you proceed (no sudo needed because you are in a root shell):

Code:
apt-get update
Code:
dpkg --configure -a
Code:
apt-get dist-upgrade
Code:
apt-get -f install
Let us know how that goes. Remember it's quite common to have to repeat the above commands in no specific order.