I'm hoping you can help me, as it appears the LMDE update I applied has turned my PC into a nice heat-generating brick on a Monday morning.
The story appears somewhat common here - after an upgrade, I'm having problems with the X-server, with repeated error messages:
- Code: Select all
WARNING: GdmDisplay display lasted XX seconds
My machine has an NVIDIA card, and here's one suspected example of a similar case I think:
viewtopic.php?f=198&t=99175&p=564872
So, whilst disappointed that I'd need to do the grunt work myself to get my machine X-ready again, I was happy to do so (this is my work machine, and I'm certainly not working...). Anyway, I booted up the live CD (via USB), pulled off the latest NVIDIA driver to install, mounted my /home partition (it's separate from /, but I mounted this to check the log files and figure out what the problem was)
My main problem is this:
I am *very* sure I set my root password (not the sudo password, I mean the root password, via "sudo passwd"). However, I am totally unable to access the recovery terminal. In grub, I select the recovery option, for either of the two kernels (the result is the same). After booting, I'm asked to enter the "root password for maintenance". After typing + hitting enter, the system just sits there, seemingly doing nothing.
I can't "break" into the prompt with combinations of CTRL+C, CTRL+\ or CTRL+z. If I do CTRL+D (as per instructions to skip the login and continue booting, into X..), I'm hit with the flickering display arising from my original driver problem.
If I enter the incorrect password deliberately, it does recognise this and gives me the prompt back to re-enter a correct password.
Can anyone please advise me how to un-brick my system. At this moment, just getting into the recovery console will be major progress. It's also a little concerning that this can happen. I'm not convinced I'm entirely at fault here (I confess, if I hadn't set the root pw, I might be slightly culpable), but I've never experienced this level of helplessness post-update on any of the other distros I've used.
Thanks all for your time, and for reading this far...
Dave
PS - re-install is not an option. I really don't want to lose all my installed libraries, programs etc...
