X server start up failure

Press Escape to view the GRUB menu when you're booting. Select the second option (Recovery). There is as option to repair X11. Try that out and see if it fixes things for ya.

FYI - Ubunty related questions should be asked at answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu instead.

Tried that. For some reason when I try to login in the the root shell it denies me access, meaning every file has only read-only access? Any ideas?

Will post the next thread in the forum next time.

Cheers

Can you pastebin ~/.xsession-errors

Couldn't find .xsession-errors, but did find syslog and Xorg.21.log in /var/log. But now cannot seem to mount usb_stick ...

You said that you are unable to start GDM or log in. Therefor I need to know how you are trying to mount your USB drive. In Gnome, USB devices are mounted automatically. This daemon process is not running until you are logged in and Gnome is running.

What happens if you try to force start it yourself?
go to TTY1 (Ctrl+Alt+F1)
log in
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

If issues happen, they should now be displayed in the TTY. You may need to go back to TTY1 to see these messages.

When I start to force it myself same message appears: ... GDM cannot start up due to an internal error. Check syslog for errors ...

Trying to login at root shell: -bash: /dev/null: Permission denied ...

It might be easiest for you to create a bug report about what is going on.

You can use the command "ubuntu-bug xorg" to automatically generate a bug from your system. At that point, you will have a bug number that you can use the "Link existing bug" link in the top right to tie this question to.

Using ubuntu-bug will also give a significant amount of information for us to review.

Not having much luck with this. Got a message saying ***Error: Network problem Could not upload report to crash database: [Errno 2] No useable temporary directory found in ['/tmp', '/var/tmp','/usr/tmp','etc/X11'] ... I doubt that was supposed to happen.

I do appreciate your help on this though. Any further ideas?

If you keep your /home directory on another partition, then it may be time to just grab a CD and reinstall your system. I'm guessing at this point doing a reinstall is going to take significantly less time that it would take to actually debug the issue.

I'm sorry I'm not able to figure this one out. Unable to access /tmp is an error I've never seen before.

If you do keep your /home on a different partition, you can just make sure to NOT reformat the partition when installing but still mark it as your /home. If not, then you will need to back up your data before reinstalling. You can just boot to a Live CD to save all your data to an external device. This is probably a good idea anyway. In addition, when you reinstall, ensure that you do make a separate /home partition.

My personal layout is:
/boot | 125MB
/ | 14GB
swap | 2GB
/home | 224GB