Ubuntu – In recovery mode, cannot type in the terminal

bootgrub2nvidiarecovery-mode

So I have been having problems with my graphics card (Nvidia Geforece GT 620) and Ubuntu not reading it. I then booted into recovery mode to try and get any updates.

Upon clicking recovery mode, all of the recovery menu items (resume, clean, dpkg, failsafeX, fsck, grub, network, and system-summary) all prompt me with error messages, Continuing with remount you / filesystem in read/write mode and mount any other filesystem defined in /etc/fstab. Do you wish to continue?. When I hit yes, it will bring up a terminal at the bottom which I can type into but it does not return anything when i hit enter.

When in I drop to root shell prompt from the GRUB, i can type in sudo apt-get install nvidia-update and get

W: Not using locking for read only lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock
E: Unable to write /var/cache/apt/
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened

When I boot normally, I get an error message that says "The system is running in low-graphics mode. Your screen, graphics card, and input device settings could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure them yourself." And the result of any of the options after that screen are a black screen with some writing already on it, and it will let me type but not accept any commands. WHAT TO DO?

Best Answer

To make any changes in the root command prompt, you need to remount with read/write access:

mount -o remount,rw /

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to Enter Recovery Mode from Grub

I know you posted this back in May, but I found some stuff that might help anyone looking at this article. I have the same exact problem, and I have not found a true fix for my symptoms yet, but I figured I would post some of my findings.

First, the trick with running some apt-get updates can be found here:link.

I modified mine a bit based on some other articles I read, and also because I encountered one error message with the cp command while trying to copy:

(This is assuming you did the first two steps from the link above and are running from a Live CD that you booted from)

sudo mkdir /media/precise
sudo mkdir /media/precise/proc /media/precise/dev /media/precise/etc
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/precise
sudo mount -o bind /proc /media/precise/proc
sudo mount -o bind /dev /media/precise/dev/
sudo mount -o bind /dev/pts /media/precise/dev/pts
sudo cp --remove-destination /etc/resolv.conf /media/precise/etc/resolv.conf
sudo chroot /media/precise apt-get update
sudo chroot /media/precise apt-get upgrade
sudo chroot /media/precise apt-get update --fix-missing
sudo chroot /media/precise dpkg --configure -a
sudo chroot /media/precise dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
sudo chroot /media/precise apt-get -f install

The reason I had to add the --remove-destination is because I was getting an error message that read something to the effect of: cp: not writing through dangling symlink path/to/danling/symlink/a-file (found the solution for that here: force cp to copy on dangling symlinks)

Secondly, it wasn't until the OS booted that the problem presented itself (hence why the Live Disk worked just fine). So, choosing different option in Grub was possible. I had gone back by two kernels and still had the problem.

Finally, while working on it with someone else at work, he had looked the computer the day before, and said that he booted back several kernels and got into command line, but not GUI. This was a great start because I had an Apache Web Server I needed to get up and available for people again ASAP. So, right now, the machine is running on an old kernel with a broken GUI but apparently working CLI and I am not sure what to do next. Try to remove the kernel? Remove and reinstall X? Not totally sure, but at least its a start, and maybe the link and code I listed above will be a fix for someone else with this problem.

Ubuntu – Error: invalid video mode specification ‘text’ Booting in blind mode –after invidia installation and update through apt-get update

This happened to me when the grub configuration (as can be seen by pressing 'e' for "Edit" at boot time) contained: set gfxpayload=text Just removing it (manually, in grub) fixed the problem. What's strange is that the same line worked before, on the same computer, before re-running grub2-mkconfig for the Nth time, not sure what happened.

This entry comes from GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text in /etc/default/grub, for the record.

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