Boot hang after 17.3 update!

[djamesp]

I have not updated mint since last fall for various reasons. I am running 17.3 Cinnamon. I avoid release updates because of various backward compatibility problems with matlab.

Today I did a system update (of packages, not to a new version of mint). It is now badly borked.

After the update it now will not boot. This is a dual-boot machine (Win7 & mint). After I select mint on the grub menu, the machine hangs forever with a spinning wheel. Problems staring X, maybe?

I have tried booting into the "recovery" version of mint offered by grub, but I am not very familiar with it, and had no success. On the recovery menu I have tried the "dpkg" option, but this (oddly, to me) runs fsck and then just hangs for hours. Why would selecting "dpkg" run fsck? I have done this several times, and that's what it does.

So maybe there is a problem starting the x server. Is there a way to boot directly to a console WITHOUT at boot time, without being able to edit system files etc.? Since I obviously cannot easily edit system files. Also, trying the keystrokes that normally flip you into a console don't work while the system is hanging with the spinning wheel thingy.

I also can't really report much about my installation of mint, since, er, it hangs on boot.

I appreciate that I can just boot the latest mint from a usb drive and start from scratch, but holy cow - I have a lot of software installed on the broken system. My data is backed up, but still...this is two days of work to reinstall stuff.

[djamesp]

My bad. I was using the wrong key sequence to get a virtual console. So now I can log in to a console and thus the problem is with X. I will look on that forum to see how to debug X problems from command line.