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I'm using a ThinkPad X11. I hit sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt autoremove after a month off - that was stupid, I know. I don't really remember the Ubuntu version it was running.

Upon rebooting, the laptop briefly goes to the "Lenovo + Ubuntu logo" screen, then the white screen with the "Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. Please contact a system administrator" message appears.

enter image description here

I have found a lot of solutions online, but everyone seems to be able to invoke a terminal. I have tried every conceivable key combination. Only Ctrl+Fn+Alt+F6 does anything at all, but it just takes me to a black screen with a white cursor. Pressing key combinations like Ctrl+c/z etc. on this black screen does not do anything.

Is there anything I can do from here to recover?

Edit: If I start spamming Ctrl+Fn+Alt+F6 before the white screen appears, I can briefly see this log: enter image description here

Then, when I turn the laptop off, this log briefly appears enter image description here

Darina
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1 Answers1

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I was able to solve this myself and posting this here for anyone who might run into the same issue. The key was to access the grub recovery menu, which I was able to do by hitting escape once the "press enter" screen disappeared, but before the ubuntu logo showed up. From there I was able to select recovery mode and go to the command line.

From the command line, connected to wifi following this How do I connect to a WiFi network using nmcli? . Then I was able to run the steps here After Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04: "Oh no! Something went wrong" , which were enough to successfully reboot.

Really the only bit of knowledge that was missing and took me so long to figure out was accessing the grub menu.

Darina
  • 111