My OS Is Bricked!

I have Zorin OS 9 installed on my Acer notebook with 16GB of RAM, there is no dual boot situation going on here. Its got the Nvidia Geforce 640M graphics onboard as well as an Intel graphics chip. I did many customisations to the OS to make it how I wanted it, and it was working fine. I have gotten a ton of updates over the course of a month, and admittedly, I didn't restart after every one. The last update I got was for the Nvidia graphics. I was forced to restart this time because I couldn't get the media player to load up. I have my system setup to check the file system after every reboot, just a good step of maintenance incase there are problems with the filing system. Well, the only image I get on screen after a restart is the Zorin logo, along with it saying its checking the file system, and this only shows on screen extremely momtenarily, then the computer stops sending a video signal to the tv. Opening my notebook doesn't help cause nothing shows on that screen either. To make my system quicker to load without my input, I had disabled the grub loader from showing up. So now even if I hold down the shift key while booting the computer, I can't even pull that up.

The only way I am able to use this computer now, is running Zorin live mode off of USB stick, so I am still able to recover my files off of the SSD drive thankfully, and I have network access so I could copy the files over to my file server if need be. What would be your recommendation to getting my system back up and running. Cause at this point, it seems only a reinstall of the OS could get me back up and running normally. And if this is the case, I am simply not going to do that again, as Zorin 12 will soon be released I am sure, and I rather install that version. So for now I will continue to run in live mode off of USB stick. I hate that my OS is bricked now, was working fine till the updates and restart.

Can you get the Boot menu during boot to choose Advanced mode?

Is not the boot menu called the GRUB menu? If so the answer is no, I can't get the boot menu, unless its a different key I need to hold down? I am sure it was that video driver update that killed my installation. I can boot off of my USB installation stick of Zorin linux, but in its advanced menu, there is nothing in there. Thankfully I can boot into the USB stick and be able to recover my files if necessary but looks to me I am going to have to do a reinstall. In which case, I will wait for Zorin OS 12. Until then I am using my tablet, cause its customised how I like it, as you know when booting Zorin OS live its pretty basic so ya.

There are a few things you can try but most of it would require quite a bit of tinkering I think.

From a live disk you can in some cases (Not when the drive is encrypted) chroot into the existing drive and run programs as if you were running the computer, some work fine others wont, depending on what system resources they need to access during execution.

The first step no matter how you do it is finding the partition with Zorin on it.

Code:

sudo parted -l

then you will need to mount the partition with Zorin loaded on it, which will have two steps involved, making a directory to mount to, and actually mounting.

Code:

mkdir mydrive
sudo mount <disk><number>

Example:

Code:

test@test-CBox:~$ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA VBOX HARDDISK (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 26.8GB           <<==== This is where the device info is
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system     Flags
1      1049kB  22.5GB  22.5GB  primary   ext4            boot    <<== This is my Zorin root your's may vary
2      22.5GB  26.8GB  4293MB  extended
5      22.5GB  26.8GB  4293MB  logical   linux-swap(v1)


Warning: Unable to open /dev/sr0 read-write (Read-only file system).  /dev/sr0
has been opened read-only.
Error: /dev/sr0: unrecognised disk label
Model: VBOX CD-ROM (scsi)                                                 
Disk /dev/sr0: 59.3MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 2048B/2048B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags:

test@test-CBox:~$ mkdir mydrive
test@test-CBox:~$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 ./mydrive
test@test-CBox:~$

the next step is to chroot in as the root user this is a pretty simple task.

Code:

sudo chroot ./mydrive

You will now be able to run some programs and such in the CLI as the root user of the installed machine.

The issue is, there are a number of things it can be and where should we start. I would suggest trying to reinstalling the nvidia drivers and updating grub first.

Being that this is only the start and not any steps to actually resolve the issues I suggest you keep in mind a wipe and reload is much simpler, just make sure you do a long format on the driver first this will save you alot of headpain later down the road.

Ya, at this point I do believe only a reinstall is going to get me going again, but with Zorin OS 12 soon to be released, I am just going to wait. But I do want to mention a couple of things. Zorin OS 9 installer seemed to have the ability to wipe the old partitions and create the new ones all on its own. However, since you recommend formating my SSD drive to help secure it for problems down the road, I will remember to do that. also another thing I want to mention if you ever boot up off of Zorin Live on a USB stick, Zorin automatically seems to mount the other drives in your system for you. Which sure saves me work when it comes to recovering my files lol.

I think I have made a decision at this point to in regards to the update system. I think in the future with Zorin OS 12, I am going to allow Zorin to update most of the system, but if there is a way to disable updating of the video driver, I'd like to do that. Because its very clear to me that Zorin decided to update my video driver to an unstable driver and toasted my ability to get into my install. So ya, will be disabling that from now on. Thanks for trying to help guys, you can imagine how this made my day all stressful.

Hi,
If you havent done reinstall yet, have you tried to tinker it with non-graphical interface by pressing ctrl+alt+f1 when computer has booted to graphical interface? If not you might be able to salvage install still with few steps.

Once in terminal check drivers that you have
dkms status

You may get something like this
virtualbox, 5.1.6, 4.8.0-26-generic, x86_64: installed
nvidia, 367.57, 4.8.0-27-generic, x86_64: installed

To remove all Nvidia drivers, make back to “clean” state.

Stop lightdm
sudo service lightdm stop

Remove drivers
sudo apt-get purge $(dpkg -l | awk '$2~/nvidia/ {print $2}')

This should remove all nvidia drivers and now you should be clean.
You may want to double check and you no longer nvidia.
dkms status

and after that
sudo service lightdm restart

Hope this helps.