ubuntu upgrade total failure, help please :/

greyed

I was trying to upgrade from 7.10 gutsy to 8.04 hardy with the update manager, I installed all the latest updates, rebooted, and then hit the upgrade button. Installation went fine, but now when I start it up there is simply a blank screen after the loading bar. No login, no mouse, just what looks like crosshatches on beige, sometimes with a thick black column down the middle.
Any ideas what I can do here? Grub says its 8.04, I can get the terminal with ctrl-alt-f1. Will I have to do a clean install? will that work?

Dell vostro 1500, 2GBram, 2.2core 2 duo, nvidia geforce 8600m gt, sigmatel audio... dual boot with xp pro sp2

Any help would be great as its totally fckd:(

An Fear Aniar

Try to install the desktop:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

That's assuming the DHCP got you connected to the internet.

Do

ifconfig

to see.

Another one to help see what happened is

dmesg | more

This shows the messages created as the system boots up.

I've seen people say on the Ubuntu forums that it always better to do a clean upgrade from a CD.

If you do have to do a fresh install, make sure to set up a seperate root and /home folder. That makes the upgrade process seamless.


.

greyed

There was no net connection unfortunately, got it fixed now though from the ubuntuforums... these commands did the job in case anyone has similar probs...

sudo apt-get update                         
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

no net connection, skipped above.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

Thanks Fear Aniar, will use a CD next time alright.

Orion

I've done upgrades using the package manager fine. The problem - based on your xorg reconfigure was your video drivers. This has happed to me with a kernel update.

Install Envy. It's a video driver manager for Debian. Next time this happens - and it probably will - from the console run "envy -t" - accept all defaults and you're sorted.

greyed

Ah cool, thanks.