Linux Mint softlocks during boot process

[Mint user 2142]

Hi, I'm dual booting Linux Mint 17 and Windows 10. A problem occurred recently when I was compiling some programs. I think after a command in the typical "./configure, make, make install" process, the screen froze and I had to perform a hard reboot (power button in until it restarts).

Now when I launch Linux Mint it gets past the screen showing the Mint logo with loading dots under it, and the screen then goes dark while showing a cursor that is a loading circle. I can move this cursor around but can not see anything else on the screen.

I thought this might be the screen loaded before showing the login prompt but it did not dissapear after 10 minutes. I've tried rebooting it a few times but this occurred each time.
Any suggestions on how to proceed?

[Mute Ant]

You might try pressing the Esc key when the dots are showing. That usually switches off the splash screen and shows you the nosplash... a long list of messages as the OS starts up.

You might try pressing the F key when it's obvious the boot has frozen. Sometimes a damaged file-system needs human interaction to 'F' fix a problem. You might see a message Keys: prompting you to do this.

You can hold down the right-shift-key when the boot starts and interrupt GRUB to select Recovery Mode, which lets you repair the file-system and do a few other janitor tasks.

[Mint user 2142]

Hey, pressing Esc did indeed turn off the splash screen, but it just showed black, no messages showing the OS starting up. I could keep pressing esc to turn the splash back on/off but it wasn't useful. After the normal amount of time the splash/black screen dissapeared and showed the black screen+loading circle as previously described.

The boot wans't obviously frozen, just softlocked, but I tried pushing f and F at various points during the boot process, no luck.

Not sure which part of the boot process you meant to hold shift at, but I was able to select advanced options for Linux Mint at the GRUB menu and saw the recovery mode there, none of the options there seem to have helped as the boot process locks at the loading circle still.

Any more suggestions? I always have the option of reinstalling but I'd really like to avoid doing that, been doing a lot of customization work.
Could booting from a Live CD/USB be useful?

[Cosmo.]

If you are in bad luck you have damaged the file system by hard rebooting. (Never do this, there are other methods to reboot, at least the reisub method should work.)

Boot again into recovery mode and do a file system check there.

[Mint user 2142]

Thanks for the information on the resiub method, first time i'd heard of that. The file system checks didn't identify anything useful unfortunately.
I'll be reinstalling soon, just need to recover files from my encrypted home partition first. Luckily I've had to do this before so we'll see how much trouble I'll have.