Big problem upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04 Natty

Please tell the graphic card you have...

If you press Ctrl-F2, can you open a terminal?
If so, try to do sudo -s -H to login as Root, and then type startx, to see if the x windows will start. If not, insert the live cd and try to boot from that and see if you can recover the system that way.

Let me know how it goes.
Thanks
Paul

marco- not sure about the card- am probably going to have to pull the covers to find out

Paul- I've restarted the thing a dozen times, and actually got the GNU GRUB to come up once. It gave me about 5 choices of Ubuntu to , and I picked the the one that was as close to "safe mode" as possible. The system went through several upgrades, and we could see all the new toolbars and other stuff. BUT I haven't been able to get to come back up since trying to restart it.

I've tried the CTRL-F2 several times, but all I'm getting into is the BIOS- great, I can rearrange to boot-up sequence, but can't access much more than that. One thing to note is that on boot-up's without the live CD, I keep getting failure messages on the "fsck from util-linix-ng 2.17.2". Anything from something report generator to the most recent being "Starting System V runlevel compatibility" -it something different everytime

Ugh...

fwiw- the most frequent failure message to come up is "Stopping automatic crash report generation"

Try booting normally. Make sure to wait past the time when pressing keys might result in you entering your BIOS. Then press Ctrl+Alt+F2. To switch virtual consoles (and thus access a usable terminal) you don't always need the Ctrl in the key combination, but you always need the Alt.

If that works, then you can log in. You won't see any placeholder characters like * as you enter your password, but that's OK--just type it in and press enter.

Running startx is extremely unlikely to work--the graphical user interface will be unable to run that way, just like it's unable to run now. But you could try it, and see what happens--the error messages may be very useful.

So I recommend you connect your computer to the Internet with an Ethernet cable (if you can) and run the following commands (please note that these instructions do *not* involve the use of "sudo -s -H"):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

Let each command complete (so you get another $ _ prompt). If any of them fail, please post here again, rather than running the next one. These commands update your system (as there have been some fixes for video problems released recently). The last one reboots it. If the problem is then solved, great--you can then mark this question as Solved. But if you still have the problem (and you very well may), then press Ctrl+Alt+F1 again, log on, and run these commands (in the "cat" command, please note that the character between the two periods is a numeral zero, not a capital letter o):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pastebinit
sudo lshw -c video > typescript
echo > typescript
script -a
startx
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log
exit
pastebinit -b http://paste.ubuntu.com -i typescript

Please try hard to avoid typos. Those commands will collect information relating to your problem and, at the end, post it to http://paste.ubuntu.com. Part of this process will be to attempt to start the graphical user interface. That will probably fail, but it should produce some useful information in failing. When you run the last command, you'll get a URL where the information was posted. Please take down that URL, and post it here.