Trouble booting 14.1

[pda]

I've been happily using many earlier mint versions for a few years, so am surprised to be suddenly having a few different troubles with 14. It may be just this one particular system that's problematic, although 12 and 13 are both running on it alright.

I'll appreciate if anyone has suggestions to get past any of the following.

1. After installing, the grub there from before hasn't changed, although there were no errors in installing it.

2. After updating the grub setup, I'm only able to boot into the new 14.1 installation in single-user mode. Going multi-user hangs indefinitely after mount filesystems. What might it be doing?

3. I also tried putting the mint14-kde-rc, but the installer kept crashing when trying to set up filesystem layout.

This last seemed especially odd after having put the same version on a similar box a few days earlier. The disk was much smaller, and my best guess is that all the logical volumes could be one of the causes.

[pda]

There were a couple of problems I had to solve here. Firstly, while I was able to install to a system partitioned with some data on lvms, I discovered the new install didn't even have the lvm2 package, so wouldn't start! I think this has since been fixed, as I was able to install the KDE-RC version to a different machine with lvms on it.

More critically still, before getting as far as above I needed to change the type of a freebsd partition on the disk to something mint could recognize. This was causing a window to pop up with an error during the installation phase where it tries to mount all the partitions. But why do this for types it can't even recognize? Apparently this error was fatal, although it didn't sound that way to me at the time. The installation never finished at all, which explains the lack of grub.

Having said all of above, after succeeding in the interim, I'm back about where I started. After installing numerous addition packages, I can only get the system into single-user mode. It just hangs forever in multi-user. Anyone have a clue how to debug this, or is it a better debian or ubuntu question?

[pda]

D'oh! I eventually clued into the fact that it was really only the lightdm service that was hanging, not the whole system, so virtual consoles other than tty1 were accessible.

I added lightdm not because I specifically wanted it, but because it came along with kubuntu-desktop.